In April 2025, in a Moscow café, American blogger Sasha demonstrated the unique ability to pay for purchases with a smile using a biometric facial recognition system. The video quickly went viral, gaining millions of views and generating widespread interest around the world.
According to Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank and the developer of smile payment technology, the number of payment terminals equipped with biometric payment functions in Russia has surpassed one million devices, establishing the system as one of the largest in the world. Sberbank has invested actively in developing its own ecosystem of biometric payments, independent of the external environment.
In Q1 2025, Russians made over 37.5 million payments totaling nearly 30 billion rubles using biometric technology. This marks a notable increase in the number of payments compared to 2024 and underscores the rapid growth in the service’s popularity.
“Russia is one of the early adopters of biometric payments, with the technology gaining widespread use,” says Dmitry Malykh, Senior Vice President and Head of Transaction Banking at Sberbank. “The results show a shift from the early stages of innovation to broad acceptance – from the initial adopters to the mainstream. Typically, it takes 3-4 years for such technologies to gain full traction, but we introduced ‘Smile to Pay’ in the summer of 2023.”
The technology is expanding not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also across various regions. International media reports from the Czech Republic and Poland highlight Russian biometric payments as a notable technological breakthrough. Unlike the United States and China, where biometric payments face regulatory barriers or are less prevalent, the Russian system exemplifies successful adaptation and innovation development.
This year, plans are underway in Russia to further advance the widespread implementation of biometric payments and to create a unified cross-biometric service that will allow customers from any bank to make purchases using facial recognition.
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Press office
