The company behind 300,000 Eftpos terminals across Australia is hoping shoppers will want to make payments by simply glancing at a screen, as biometric technology pushes further into retailing. Verifone is selling the innovation as “pay for your coffee with a smile”, promising faster checkouts for people who opt in to having their face or palm-vein – the veins in people’s hands – biometrics used for Eftpos transactions in Australia. It may take a long time before the technology is widely available, however, with cafes, restaurants and retailers required to upgrade their existing equipment. The head of product for Asia Pacific at Verifone, Ben Hughes, said the biometric payments will ease the “friction” of slow transactions. “If you go to a grocery store and you have to tap a loyalty card, plus tap a payment card, that’s the kind of thing that now we’d be able to speed up,” he said. He said the company was expecting retailers to deploy the Verifone Victa devices, which launched last month, incrementally as their current terminals reached their end of life. Hughes said the technology will need buy-in from banks and other organisations that want to allow their customers to pay using biometrics. Biometrics are converted into tokens on the device, he said, meaning images are not stored by Verifone, but biometric profiles are managed by merchants, banks or digital wallet providers. Customers will be able to continue to use contactless payments on their card or phone. Hughes said the company had measures in place to avoid users “spoofing” other people’s hands or faces, as has been seen in the rollout of facial verification technology, similar to that used in age assurance technology for Australia’s social media ban. The company is expecting some pushback on the shift to biometrics, but compared it to