The Galaxy S8’s facial recognition feature may support mobile payments according to a new rumor. The feature will not immediately be available on Samsung’s upcoming flagship devices that are scheduled to be announced at the end of this month on March 29th, rather Samsung would enable the mobile payment support for facial recognition a number of months after the phone is launched, which is rumored to be around April 21st in South Korea, and potentially the following week in the U.S. and Canada.
In addition to mobile payments being secured by facial recognition alongside the methods like PIN numbers and fingerprints which already work with mobile payment systems currently, the rumor also states that Samsung is already working with banks to get facial recognition working with their payment institutions and to get banks to accept the unlock method. The rumor only mentions Samsung Pay as a supported mobile payment method so it’s unlikely that it would support Android Pay or PayPal, as facial recognition would have to be integrated by the companies behind those mobile payment systems. If that’s the case, Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus owners will have access to something that owners of other devices will not. In addition to mobile payments, the rumor also alleges that users would be able to use the facial recognition to access other mobile services, though it isn’t explained what those other mobile services could be.
The facial recognition feature was initially rumored to be included with Samsung’s upcoming new smartphones back on March 10th, but at the time there was no mention of the new security method supporting anything other than allowing users to unlock their device. With that said, the facial recognition itself is still just a rumor as nothing has been confirmed by Samsung in regards to this new method of unlocking the phone. If facial recognition supports Samsung Pay on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, it isn’t detailed when exactly Samsung would actually bring the feature to the two phones, as “some months” could be referring to sometime during the Summer or it could be further out than that. It seems though that the plan is to have it launched on both phones sometime this year, though it would also largely depend on the support of the banks.