Alipay upgrades facial-recognition system

Mobile payment giant Alipay on Thursday announced a major upgrade to its 'Smile to Pay' service, aiming to make its facial-recognition process more accessible to merchants and customers.

The new version, dubbed Dragonfly, is essentially a plug-and play device that Alipay claims to be just one-tenth the size of a traditional self-service POS machine and can be placed in a backpack.

Compared with its previous generation, Dragonfly is adaptable to a wide array of terminals and does not require merchants to overhaul their existing Enterprise Resource Planning system. This lowers the threshold for adopting facial-scanning facilities, said Zhong Yao, general manager of Alipay's internet of things business.