The news: Fiserv will bring face and palm payments technology to Clover’s checkout experience through a partnership with Wink, per a press release.

Quick service restaurants (QSRs), sports venues, and retailers will receive priority biometric enablement at checkout, with more rollouts planned through 2026.

How we got here: Consumers have become accustomed to biometrics in their daily lives, especially through features like Apple’s Face ID to complete mobile transactions. 

However, they’ve been less receptive to biometric payments at the point-of-sale (POS): Amazon has struggled to get its Amazon One technology to stick with shoppers, especially amid privacy concerns: 73% of consumers are not at all uncomfortable making payments with the tech, per CivicScience. Merchants have also been reluctant to share consumer shopping data with Amazon, whose retail arm could directly compete with their businesses.

Why this matters: Clover’s biometric checkout offers merchants an alternative to Amazon without the same conflicts of interest. 

However, merchants enabling biometric payments face an uphill battle to onboard consumers. Consumer trust in biometric technology has fallen: Only a quarter of shoppers trust the tool, down from 50% in 2022, per a GetApp survey. 

Recommendations for merchants: Merchants trying to operationalize biometric payments’ strengths—speed, sanitation, instant age verification—need to give better incentives to get consumers onboard. Rewards or exclusive offers for uploading their information could convince skittish consumers to try something new at checkout.