Apple Face ID Made Waves, What’s Next for Facial Recognition?

On September 12th, the much-anticipated Apple Special Event took place and brought with it the announcement of the iPhone X. One of the most exciting things that Apple unveiled with the demonstration of the newest iPhone was the integration of Apple Face ID technology.

While facial recognition technology has been a work in progress for over 150 years and has been used in a variety of industries, the use of advanced technology in such a mainstream product has propelled the conversation to the forefront once again.

As the iPhone X facial recognition technology will become the new standard for smartphones and other consumer devices, more and more industries will begin integrating such technology.

Below is an overview of how we think the latest resurgence of facial recognition technology will impact other industries.

Improved Shopping Experience

As facial recognition technology becomes more mainstream, the retail industry has increasing opportunities to reinvent the shopping experience and learn more about shoppers.

Retail giant Walmart, who consistently seeks out new ways to remain innovative, already experimented with facial recognition technology to spot shoplifters in 2015. This past August they announced that they will be piloting facial recognition once again, using it to scan shoppers and determine what type of shopping experience they are having based on their facial expression. By identifying seemingly unhappy shoppers, Walmart could take necessary steps to turn negative experiences into positive ones, and increase customer loyalty along the way.

Unilever is also experimenting with facial recognition technology to improve customer experience, as well as to impact marketing efforts. The makers of Marmite recently launched the Marmite Gene Project that determines if a consumer is likely to love or hate the disputed spread, based on their facial expression. The campaign has been used both internally to understand consumer preferences and as a marketing campaign that ended up going viral.

In a recent update to their app, makeup retail brand Sephora introduced Sephora Virtual Artist, which uses facial recognition and augmented reality to let users see different looks on their face, and buy the products they want from within the app.

Virtual Artist lets Sephora shoppers try on as many looks as they want, just as they would in a store, but now they can do it where they want and when they want.

Want to read more about augmented reality? Learn Why Enterprises Need to Run Augmented Reality PoCs

Simplified Payment Solutions

If all goes well during the shopping experience, the customer will hopefully be making a purchase. Facial recognition is increasingly being used in the FinTech world to simplify payments for consumers, making the purchase process is easier as well. Payment solutions made more simple by facial recognition can both improve the customer experience and quicken the time to purchase, making it a desirable innovation for many consumer verticals.

Apple’s FaceID is expected to work with Apple Pay as well as third party apps, making one’s face all a consumer will need to complete transactions, and speeding up mainstream customers’ reliance on facial recognition.

In addition to Apple, other payment operators and processing solutions have been experimenting with facial recognition as a means of payment. Payment giant MasterCard lauched MasterCard Identity Check — being commonly referred to as selfie pay — in 2015, and is expected to continue releasing the payment solution throughout 2017. The use of facial recognition by MasterCard serves as a two-factor authentication and improvement to traditional payment methods.

Mobile operators and payment processors are not the only ones who see the ease of payment by simply smiling. Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba, partnered with Yum China to implement the facial recognition payment system Smile to Pay in a KFC branch in eastern China.

This new payment experience is meant to target the younger generation of Chinese consumers, who are expected to count for the vast majority of China’s consumption growth over the next ten years.

Improved Security Capabilities

Beyond retail, the benefits of facial recognition technology advancements can be directly seen in the security industry.

The city-wide network of CCTV cameras in Moscow have been testing the use of facial recognition to improve crime prevention, and recently unveiled their results. Following a lengthy pilot, Moscow city officials revealed that six arrests have been made based on facial recognition information captured on city cameras. While costly to operate and difficult to scale, the use of facial recognition in city security cameras is a breakthrough that will likely make its way to more cities, especially as smart cities continue to rise in demand and popularity.

Airports have also been experimenting with the use of facial recognition technology since 2015, JFK and Ottowa International among them. The Biometric Exit project aims to match individuals to their travel visa, effectively improving the security verification of travelers and working hand-in-hand with border patrol efforts.

On the virtual front, companies are using facial recognition to improve their authentication services out of an effort to reduce cybersecurity breaches. Facebook recently announced that they are testing out facial recognition as an easier two-factor authentication solution. This functionality is expected to improve the login experience while reducing the likelihood of cyber breaches to the popular social networking site.

How Long Will it Take for Facial Recognition to Be Everywhere?

There are a great number of challenges that must be overcome until facial recognition is as mainstream as companies want it to be.

Security challenges will rise, and despite testing with top Hollywood mask designers, only time will tell how secure facial recognition solutions are and how receptive consumers are to the technology.

In the meantime, companies are working hard to ensure that they have facial recognition solutions in place so that they are ready for the transition once mainstream consumers take to it well (and we’ve seen lots of proofs-of-concept on our platform that attest to that!).

Want to read more about the changes taking place in the retail space? Read about How The Retail Revolution Is Impacting Brands and Consumers.

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