Russian banks unveil “pay with your palm”
Not to be confused with "pay with a smile"
Riley Waggaman
Last week, Russian government officials and representatives from fintech firms gathered for the annual Finopolis forum to discuss the future of Russian finance and banking.
source: https://finopolis.ru/en
The conference was held in the Sirius Federal Territory, located outside of Sochi, which operates under an “experimental legal regime”, allowing the municipality to implement “projects that serve as models for Russian regions”.
Thanks to its special status, Sirius has plans to fast-track the use of robots, artificial intelligence, biometric technologies, and the digital ruble in shops and restaurants.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that Russia’s fintech leaders met in Sirius—described as “the future of the country”—to announce their latest breakthrough:
source: tass.ru
Commenting on the introduction of a biometric palm-payment system, Yulia Kopytova, a senior vice president at VTB Bank, said:
The technology of human identification using a person’s palm is already operating in other countries, for example, in China. Modern payment solutions are increasingly making the need to constantly carry not only cash or a card, but also a smartphone or other device, obsolete.
Authentication by biometric data allows you to make payments literally on the go: in public transport or in a coffee shop. The new option of accepting payment by palm is the next phase in the development of the payment market and bio-acquisition, another step towards improving the convenience and speed of service in various areas of trade and services.
Kommersant provided further details about this new payment method:
It is planned that in the future the palm will be added to the list of approved [biometric] options, which can be registered centrally together with the image of one’s face or a voice sample. The consumer will be able to choose the method of authentication or identification when making a payment or verifying his or her age. When adopting changes in a number of regulations, the original samples of the [palm] vein pattern will be stored in the Unified Biometric System (UBS) … This will ensure the safe use of the palm in biometric services.
Not to be outdone, Russia’s largest bank, Sber, announced its own roadmap for implementing palm-payments:
source: tass.ru
Sber began experimenting with this technology a decade ago. In 2015, the bank launched a pilot program, Ladoshki (“Little Palms”), that allowed schoolchildren to use biometrics to purchase meals:
To pay for lunch, the student puts his hand to the scanner on a special machine, selects a dish from the menu, and the money is automatically debited from the account attached to the biometrics.”
Sber’s “Little Palms” biometric payment system for school meals.
In the summer of 2023, Sber introduced “Pay with a Smile,” a biometric payment system that uses facial recognition to debit a user’s bank account.
Since then, the technology has been slowly but steadily integrated into Russian commerce.
Sber celebrated World Smile Day, held on the first Friday of October, with the goal of “devoting a day to smiles and spreading random acts of kindness”, by releasing new figures on Pay with a Smile’s adoption:
On World Smile Day, which is celebrated in 2025 on October 3, Sber calculated the number of purchases using the “Pay with a Smile” service in the Northwestern Federal District [a federal district with a combined population of 13.6 million, with St. Petersburg as its administrative center]. In the first nine months of this year, residents of the District made 17.7 million payments using biometrics. This is 8 times more than in the same period last year.
The leader of Pay with a Smile transactions is St. Petersburg (almost 6 million payments worth more than 5.2 billion rubles) and the Leningrad region (almost 2 million transactions totaling 1.5 billion rubles).
The District currently has 93,000 terminals that support “Pay with a Smile” technology.
Although users of the technology remain in the minority, the infrastructure for transitioning to biometric payment is already in place. The bank announced at the end of 2024 that it had already installed 1 million terminals across Russia.
“Several years ago the smartphone became the key to many services. And thanks to our technologies payments have transformed into a natural and instant gesture without the need to use a phone. Paying with a smile is part of a larger journey toward comfortable adoption of digital services, where they simplify rather than complicate life,” Sber said in an October 3 press release.
Riley Waggaman is an American writer and journalist who has lived in Russia for close to a decade. He has contributed to many websites, including Anti-Empire, Russian Faith, Brownstone Institute, Unlimited Hangout, and Geopolitics & Empire. He worked for Press TV, Russia Insider, and RT before going solo. You can subscribe to his Substack here, or follow him on twitter or Telegram.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
When is your next article coming out?
Well said Riley, Russia is sold as fighting the NATO enemies, which clearly it is not.
It’s already happened in England . Northeast maybe, facial recognition for children to purchase school meals at least a year ago.
Why must the system/everybody know when I buy/have bought a soft ice?
Et tu Brutus…
Boy boy i admire and respect Russia way higher than most of the woke bankrupt Europe but seems that even Russia which I had a bit of Hope would save us from the f globalization the dream of the f elites is falling into it. Russia beware as soon that small tribe with small hats will (if not already) take over your banks and your central bank too. Panapticon is everywhere.
Citizens of the world unite!!!
Putin is not your friend.
Hmmm. The expression to “give them a hand” has now found a new and more dubious meaning.
Is the bio-metric route universally bad by default?
If so, then how does paying solely via cash differ from paying with the bog-standard bank card, in terms of basic information-gathering on the part of the money vultures?.
It differs the way that your payments were solely a matter between you and your filial bank, but now you are a global subject to scrutiny for all your tiny personal purchases.
And….as you can see, you didnt knew that, and you were happy! 😁 .
Great Promotion, Riley ! But i’m not sold on it…
“Why ?”, you ask. Well, last time i was robbed the masked hoodlum
demanded “Your Money or Your Life !!” so i gave him my purse…
I’m not bloody keen having the next robber chop off my hand !!
The same could be said of your fingers, eyeball or your whole head.
Perhaps, if the mugger knew that his hand would be chopped off for repeat thieving then he wouldn’t risk chopping parts of your body off for your biometrics or even risk old school theft such as snatching your purse.
Seems to work as a deterrent where Sharia Law is applied. Coming to your country in the not so distant future.
I posted a quote from ESC that is not the best for his depiction of digital ID as a core principle.
This is a better quote:
Isnt it an old game?
I am thinking on the 1920, alcohol was criminalised in the United States of America. The Volstead Act, the opium trail, the Afghan poppy fields which we found out that it was Nato who coordinated the smuggling routes. Barter trade.
Its difficult to imagine they can ever get away with this bs. I know the count on 85% support in 2030.
If US could ban possession of gold for 40 years, they can probably also get away with forcing the idiotic system on countries, but will it work?
I doubt it, and see it as just one more The Long March, Khmer Rouge regime, Stalin Gulag camps. We have been through a lot.
I find parables can hold more information – but are more readily dismissed.
The Tares among the wheat come to mind as a symbol of corruptions and conflicts that grow and compound as part of the ‘growth process’ – expressed as yield, fruits or fulfilment.
Scarcity is the means by which to ‘gain the function’ of control over needs or cultivated dependencies. Put another way – keeping people poor, sick, conflicted and dependent is the leverage called control – which is then developed as a more sophisticated tyranny, by which the slaves protect their status against fear of threat of loss of supply.
The means to surveil and enforce have been technologically extended in novel or sci-fi variants of the Old Game, but the tech is primarily (in my view) an internalised control system maintained by participance in a masking agenda – by which to mitigate or gain credits against – fear of pain of fear of loss.
Lies given power become monsters demanding sacrifice.
Persisting in what does not and can not work might be called the human conditioning – for we do the very thing we think to ‘scape to others and world. yet be-live it as done unto us.
Terror can stamp its face on a world of its own image – even to smile over the dumping out of toxic debt-conflict in sacrifices framed by collective guilting as The Good set against the greater evil.
Can it work? This question rests on what purpose is being served.
Death (and unconsciousness) as escape from life can seem to ‘work’ temporarily – at cost of ever greater sacrifice of self-honesty.
Few would openly seek in such terms and yet this is what is being ritually enacted or reiterated over and again.
New ‘solutions’ breakdown to reveal the same core conflicts – but in ever deeper camouflage.
Technology is now a plastic word: for the exactitude of subject specific requirements – as in functional performance, is now also used to frame the arbitrary assignment of probabilities to aggregate trends framed in arbitrarily weighted predicates and parameters.
And technologism – as post-truth politics, operates the targeting and hacking of the mind (core beliefs and self-definition) as its ‘gain of function’.
We have not just painted ourselves into a corner (the characteristic ego signature)— but into a system of control running as a black box with no user access.
Escape key sets out the workings of system capture as has been ratcheting control beneath the choke of Bread and provision of Circus since it first phished the mind as a self-special overriding functional organisation of a masking self-consciousness.
My focus is in recognition and release of what does not in truth serve us ; nor serve life or the living. Of course I can only accept such purpose or function within my own heart and mind. But healing reveals a whole of which no one is truly apart from or excluded – regardless of devotions to conflict, limitation and lack or disconnection – running stealth as a source of self-specialness set against loss of face or control.
I’d say that what ran hidden is now being revealed as our world—the explication of protected inner thoughts running ‘self-concept’ BY projection to the self of others. But who can recognise their own projections without first recognising the light and thus the lens?