Revolut launched a pilot of Revolut Pay with Smile on September 24, 2026. The facial recognition checkout lets enrolled customers pay in store by looking at a terminal. Merchants pay 0% processing fees on those transactions. The pilot ran from September 24 to 26 at three Kiss the Hippo cafes in London, in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho. It runs on Revolut Register, a new point-of-sale system for hospitality businesses.

Revolut calls Revolut Pay with Smile the UK’s first in-store facial recognition checkout. The face scan will draw the attention. The till underneath it, and the fee Revolut charges on its own payment method, say more about where the company is heading.

How Revolut Pay with Smile Works

Customers opt in to Revolut Pay with Smile through the Revolut app. At the counter, the terminal checks their face against the selfie from their original Revolut ID check. It then authorizes the payment. Revolut says the transaction is encrypted end to end and that merchants do not store customer data.

During the pilot, specialty coffees cost £1 and each Revolut Pay with Smile payment earned triple RevPoints, Revolut’s loyalty currency. Those incentives exist to drive enrollment, the first hurdle for any biometric payment method. Nobody can pay with their face until they have agreed to put it on file.

Revolut Register is the hardware. It is a modular, two-screen point-of-sale system that combines payments, Revolut Business banking and front-of-house tools. A built-in eSIM lets the terminal fall back to mobile data when a venue’s broadband drops. Until December 31, 2026, the first terminal costs £349.50 plus VAT. That is half the £699 list price.

The Pitch Is Aimed at Independent Venues

Revolut backed the Revolut Pay with Smile launch with research it commissioned from Censuswide. It says independent venues spend £875 a month on average on payment processing and infrastructure. Pubs and bars spend more than £950. Terminal outages cost them about £2,495 a year in lost revenue, and two thirds report customer outbursts over checkout problems several times a week. More than half of UK consumers said they had faced delays or failures when a merchant lost its internet connection.

Alex Codina, who runs merchant payments at Revolut Business, said “checkout friction is driving customers out the door.” This is vendor research published to support a launch. The release gives no sample size, so treat the exact figures with care.

The direction is right, though. Card fees and unreliable terminals are standing complaints among small hospitality operators. An offline fallback is a sensible feature for a cafe whose router sits behind the coffee machine.

Why 0% Fees Are Possible

A 0% processing fee sounds like a loss leader, and partly it is. Revolut Pay with Smile appears to run on Revolut’s own rails, though. When a Revolut customer pays a Revolut Business merchant, money can move between two Revolut accounts. No card scheme or outside acquirer sits in the middle. That removes interchange and scheme fees. Revolut has not published the settlement mechanics. Still, that closed loop is the likeliest reason it can offer 0% here while charging normal rates on card payments.

That is the strategy worth watching. Revolut Register puts hardware on the counter, and Revolut Pay with Smile gives merchants a reason to steer customers toward a method that bypasses Visa and Mastercard. Biometric Update reported that Revolut sees biometric checkout as a new revenue stream. That revenue presumably comes from Register sales, Revolut Business accounts and card processing on every payment that is not a smile.

The same logic puts Revolut in more direct competition with Square, SumUp and Dojo in UK hospitality.

The Biometric Question Behind Revolut Pay with Smile

Revolut Pay with Smile enters a category with a patchy record. Enrollment is a chore, and many people are uneasy handing their face to a payments company. David Birch of Consult Hyperion told Payment Expert that “most people would prefer having a thing they have control over.”

Revolut has already answered some of the privacy questions in its Pay with Smile privacy notice. The legal basis for the face check is explicit consent, given at enrollment and confirmed again at checkout. Revolut converts the face captured at the terminal into encrypted single-use codes, which it deletes after the check. Withdrawing consent deletes the stored biometric template.

One detail cuts the other way. Revolut keeps a copy of the photo taken at checkout as a fallback for fraud and payment disputes. It is held under general retention policies, with no specific time limit. Under UK GDPR, biometric data used for identification is special category data. The Information Commissioner’s Office is likely to expect a clearer retention period for those checkout images.

What the Pilot Proves

As a three-day pilot in three cafes, this was a marketing exercise with a real product behind it. Revolut Pay with Smile only works for enrolled Revolut customers at venues running Revolut Register. Even with a large UK customer base, the share of face payments in any one cafe will start small.

Revolut Register is the stronger offer. A till with 0% fees on Revolut-to-Revolut payments and a mobile data fallback is credible for independent venues. It fits Revolut’s habit of building its own infrastructure, which in August extended to a Revolut Research unit developing PRAGMA, its in-house AI model.

No extension or enrollment figures had been published as of September 27. Kiss the Hippo plans to roll the system out across all 12 of its London shops, with no date given. Watch whether Revolut Register turns up in venues with no promotional tie-in, and whether Revolut publishes enrollment numbers. If later announcements focus on Register alone, the face scan will have done its job as a launch hook.

For more on Revolut, see how Revolut added Colombia to its banking licenses and what Revolut Argentina gains from buying Banco Cetelem.

FintechBits covers payments, banking and fintech developments for readers in the US and UK. This article is for information only and is not financial advice. Views expressed are those of the FintechBits editorial team.