Japan’s NEC swaps cards for faces in biometric payment push

What could Japan’s first all-boys boarding school have in common with international border control?

At Kaiyo Academy in Japan’s Aichi prefecture, a convenience store is trialling the same facial recognition technology used at 80 airports globally.

Since 2022, around 600 students aged 12 to 18 and staff have been paying for snacks and stationery with just their faces. The checkpoint-grade system, developed by Japanese electronics and information technology company NEC, verifies their identity through face recognition.

This school trial is part of NEC’s broader push into biometric payments and agentic artificial intelligence (AI). Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can autonomously plan, reason and act towards a goal, going beyond generative AI’s prompt-driven capabilities.

The 126-year-old Japanese company provides a wide range of technologies from network infrastructure to AI solutions to public and private sector clients in over 50 countries.

“If you can trust the (biometric authentication used) for border control, you (should be able to) trust it for banking transactions,” said Suresh Neelakantan, NEC APAC’s head of Innovation and Development for its Digital Finance Solutions and Innovation division.

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NEC applies its AI and Human Rights Principles to its solutions, first launched in 2019 to safeguard against risks such as privacy infringement and algorithmic bias.

Beyond convenience

The hands-free technology is part of NEC’s commitment to drive safety, fairness, and efficiency through its innovations, said Tetsuya Yukutake, senior director for Digital Finance at NEC APAC.

Customers can choose to share their biometric data to access the service, retaining control over data use, he added.

The technology was also trialled at the Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, which NEC said is the largest implementation of its kind in the country. The event ran from April 13 to Oct 13, 2025.

Unlike phone-based payments, face-based payments keep biometric data off devices, reducing the risk of identity theft if a device is hacked, Suresh said.

Instead, biometric data is stored on secure servers and hashed to prevent unauthorised use even if accessed, Suresh added. Hashing is a security process that converts biometric data into a unique code that cannot be reversed.

Agents negotiating

One potential use of agentic AI is in supply chain financing. According to Suresh, a finance executive could use agentic AI to connect procurement, supplier, logistics and finance agents, improving visibility across the supply chain and enabling real-time negotiations.

As AI systems become more advanced, AI governance frameworks would need to evolve, Suresh said. For instance, an AI agent misselling a financial product raises questions about accountability and how such violations are addressed.

To manage ethical risks, NEC applies its 2019 AI and Human Rights Principles and tests new solutions internally before release, he added.

NEC will showcase its agentic AI during the Singapore FinTech Festival on Nov 12-14. Visitors at the NEC booth can learn how the technology’s autonomous agents manage cash conversion cycle and optimise supply chain financing flows, Suresh said.

This was produced in partnership with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Global Finance & Technology Network.

For more stories, go to https://bt.sg/sff2025