Alibaba is getting face recognition-enabled payments soon

Online shopping in China is about to get a whole lot easier thanks to Alibaba, the nation’s top e-commerce company. Speaking in Hanover over the weekend, Alibaba founder Jack Ma explained that online payments can be rather annoying at times, which is why the company has decided to adopt a new face recognition-enabled payments for Alipay, Alibaba’s own payments service.

For China’s online shoppers, face payments are coming soon. Yesterday at Cebit in Hanover, Alibaba founder Jack Ma took the stage to wax philosophical on entrepreneurship and the future of technology. While he oozed charisma on stage, the real treat came at the end of his address. After noting how online payments can sometimes be troublesome, the founder took out his smartphone and paid for a set of stamps on Alibaba using face-recognition technology (fast-forward to 1:17:45). Alibaba has been open about its plans to release face recognition-enabled payments for Alipay, its third-party payment service, at least since October of last year. Ma also plugged the demo on his personal Weibo account.