New Apple Pay Ads Point to Primacy of Face ID

Apple is leaning hard on the simplicity of its Face ID biometric authentication system in new ads promoting Apple Pay.

Apple Pay was already simple to use before Face ID, with new iPhones allowing users to make purchases with contactless NFC technology and verify them with a simple fingerprint scan. But the iPhone X’s Face ID system is more intuitive, with its infrared facial recognition technology allowing users to confirm their identity just by looking at their phone. And it’s the speed and simplicity of that process that Apple is highlighting in its four new ads, each of which runs less than 15 seconds long, and depicts a different scenario in which Apple Pay is used to make a quick purchase. The tagline for each spot is “Apple Pay and done.”

It’s a smart approach in terms of marketing. According to a new report from Juniper Research, the biometric authentication of mobile wallets like Apple Pay is one of the factors helping to drive their adoption, with Juniper predicting 30 percent growth in the number of mobile wallet users over the next year.

The promotions also point to the potential primacy of Face ID as Apple’s default new authentication mechanism. Its Touch ID fingerprint scanning system is inarguably more prominent, since it’s available on a range of devices while Face ID is only on the thousand-dollar iPhone X; but there is now widely held speculation that Apple is planning to include Face ID on all of this year’s new iPhones, and maybe even the new iPad tablets.

Sources: AppleInsider, 9to5Mac