In a global first, Ant International has introduced iris authentication to Alipay+ GlassPay, its AR smart glasses payment solution, through collaborations with leading smart glasses manufacturers. The platform already supports multi-modal biometric verification, including an AI-driven voice interface with intent recognition and voiceprint authentication, and the new iris feature has been successfully tested on AlipayHK. With this upgrade, merchants and service providers can deliver an even smoother, more secure, and more immersive AR-powered consumer experience. Xiaomi and Meizu are the first partners to implement these enhanced payment capabilities on smart glasses worldwide.
As AI accelerates the evolution of smart glasses, the devices are becoming a powerful bridge between physical and digital commerce, enabling instant try-ons, interactive shopping, and frictionless checkout. Industry forecasts show global consumer adoption could grow nearly sevenfold from 2024 to 2029, reaching 18.7 million units. Iris authentication’s rapid global rise is driven by its superior security: it is highly resistant to spoofing thanks to far more unique feature points than facial or fingerprint biometrics.
Alipay+ GlassPay’s iris verification analyses over 260 biometric points and uses AI with advanced liveness detection to block fraudulent attempts involving photos, videos, or 3D masks. Its imaging algorithms maintain accuracy across a wide range of lighting conditions, offering reliable, zero-contact authentication with a simple glance. The solution also includes an end-to-end security suite and personalised encryption key scheme to protect user data, with manufacturers and service providers jointly ensuring compliance with local data and security regulations.
The system is built on Ant’s gPass, the world’s first trusted connection technology framework for smart glasses, which provides a secure foundation for AI digital services, new AR application scenarios, and expanded consumer utility. As AI and AR grow, gPass aims to deliver safer and more convenient smart device experiences globally.
For merchants, AR-embedded payments unlock new customer engagement opportunities, from seamless ride-hailing to instant purchases after offline try-ons, helping reduce logistics costs and improve omnichannel efficiency. Ant International plans to bring the enhanced Alipay+ GlassPay solution to manufacturers, service providers, and developers across the Asia Pacific.
Today, Alipay+ connects more than 1.8 billion user accounts across 40 mobile payment providers to 100 million merchants in over 100 core markets. Its unified integration gives partners access to a broad toolkit, including QR and card payments via a global NFC solution and advanced agentic AI features powered by the Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit.
Speaking at the 2025 Singapore Fintech Festival, Ant International CEO Peng Yang emphasised that payment remains the core of all fintech innovation, highlighting efforts across hardware-embedded services, card-QR interoperability, bank-wallet connectivity, and AI-driven merchant payment orchestration. Ant’s Chief Innovation Officer Jiang-Ming Yang added that the company is committed to advancing payment innovation across interoperability, agentic AI, and next-generation hardware.
Xiaomi and Meizu also reinforced their vision for AI-driven smart glasses. Xiaomi highlighted its commitment to expanding partnerships to enrich global AI lifestyle experiences, while Meizu stressed that seamless, natural payment must be built on strong security foundations, from encrypted storage to liveness detection, to protect users’ biometric data.
