Watch Alibaba’s Jack Ma demonstrate face recognition-enabled payments

For China’s online shoppers, face payments are coming soon.

Yesterday at Cebit in Hanover, Alibaba founder Jack Ma took the stage to wax philosophical on entrepreneurship and the future of technology. While he oozed charisma on stage, the real treat came at the end of his address. After noting how online payments can sometimes be troublesome, the founder took out his smartphone and paid for a set of stamps on Alibaba using face-recognition technology (fast-forward to 1:17:45).

Alibaba has been open about its plans to release face recognition-enabled payments for Alipay, its third-party payment service, at least since October of last year. Ma also plugged the demo on his personal Weibo account.

We’d be willing to wager that Alibaba isn’t the only tech giant developing selfie-style payments. But given Alipay’s ubiquity in China, it might be the first company to bring the tech to market. We’ve reached out to Alibaba for more info about the demo.

Update: Alibaba tells Tech in Asia the feature is a beta version. The company has no info on an expected launch date.

Editing by Steven Millward, top image by World Economic Forum