Alipay’s face payment product "Dragonfly" has been launched in more than 300 cities across the country. In addition to the "free application" policy, WeChat Pay launched the heavyweight product "Frog Pro" in August this year, which opened up functions such as WeChat card packages and mini programs, and also introduced related support policies. From a market perspective. According to relevant reports, the face recognition market is expected to maintain an average annual growth rate of 25% in the next 5 years, and the market size will reach approximately 6.7 billion yuan in 2022.
But we think the scale is far beyond the tens of billions. The reason is that face payment is applicable to scenarios such as supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, finance, convenience stores, etc. From the convenience store scenario alone, the market size cannot be underestimated. According to data from the "2019 China Convenience Store Development Report", in 2018, the number of convenience store stores in China reached 120,000, an increase of 14% compared with more than 100,000 in 2017. In addition, there are a large number of mom-and-pop shops. Alipay’s face payment product "Dragonfly" has been launched in more than 300 cities across the country. In addition to the "free application" policy, WeChat Pay launched the heavyweight product "Frog Pro" in August this year, which opened up functions such as WeChat card packages and mini programs, and also introduced related support policies.
From the perspective of application. Ye Guohui, general manager of Alipay's industry payment business department, once said that mobile payment is an important entry point for the offline digital economy, and a global and full-link digital operation starting from payment is an inevitable trend. Obviously, it is easier for the B-end to link to the C-end for payment by face scanning than by scanning code, simplifying the path of "payment to registration to membership and then to digitization". Face-swiping payment, smart medical care, smart campus, smart bank, catering, supermarket, hotel, non-sense parking lot, various scene solutions, software customization development, payment equipment wholesale, please Baidu "Zhangyou Electronic Wei" for details
From a policy perspective. The "FinTech Development Plan (2019-2021)" issued by the Central Bank pointed out that it will explore the offline payment security application of face recognition, using password recognition, privacy calculation, data labeling, pattern recognition and other technologies, and using special passwords. , "Non-sense" living body detection, etc. to achieve transaction verification, breaking through the 1:N face recognition payment application performance bottleneck Obviously, in the next 3 years, face recognition technology will develop rapidly, and facial payment will benefit from this.
Therefore, with the promotion of Ali, Tencent, etc., face payment ushered in its "first year" journey in 2019. At present, Alipay, represented by "Dragonfly", first announced in April this year that it would invest 3 billion yuan in subsidies for facial payment in the next three years. Then, under the "blocking" of WeChat represented by "frog", in September, The original subsidy of 3 billion yuan was changed to "unlimited investment."
In addition, UnionPay has also joined this track and launched the "Pay by Face". Different from Alipay and WeChat’s "face-swiping payment" method, UnionPay uses the "face-swiping + payment password" double verification method. Undoubtedly, the entry of giants will accelerate the popularization of "face payment", and face payment will become the mainstream.