Clover Adds Face and Palm-Payments With Wink Partnership

The collaboration integrates Wink’s face and palm payments technology into Clover’s platform, the companies announced in a Wednesday (Jan. 7) news release.

“The new solution will enable Clover merchants to offer the fastest, most personalized checkout experience while helping to secure every transaction with AI-powered biometrics,” the release said. “Unifying identity, payment and loyalty allows merchants to offer brand new checkout experiences that shorten checkout times, reduce fraud exposure and increase repeat visits without adding operational complexity.”

According to the release, Clover leverages a secure token vault to manage biometric profiles, thus bolstering transaction security and making sure sensitive data is not stored alongside payment credentials. The new integration will initially be available to sports venues, retailers and quick service restaurants, with an ongoing rollout planned throughout the year.

“The future of commerce is the unification of payment and identity,” said Sanjay Saraf, global chief product officer for merchant solutions at Fiserv. “By embedding Wink’s leading biometric security and intelligence directly into the Clover platform, we’re making cutting-edge technology simple, secure and accessible for Main Street SMB businesses, helping them to deliver exceptional experiences and unlock new opportunities for growth.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has examined the importance both consumers and businesses place on biometrics. For example, 64% of credit unions (CUs) said in 2025 that they plan to offer biometric authentication or digital identity in the next three years.

This “still leaves some room for improvement, as roughly a third of CUs are yet to join that biometric authentication pantheon,” PYMNTS wrote last year.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke in 2024 with Wink founder and CEO Deepak Jain, part of a group of experts who say that CAPTCHA’s effectiveness as a security measure has been fading.

“CAPTCHAs are cheap, and that’s part of the problem,” Jain told PYMNTS. “When users encounter a CAPTCHA, it can give the impression of a low-cost product or a brand that doesn’t prioritize security — more of a ‘Protected by’ security sign on your lawn without an actual security system in place.”

The apparent cost-effectiveness of CAPTCHAs may be misleading, as Jain argued they can harm businesses by reducing the perceived quality of a brand’s security. Industry leaders have already shifted away from this technology.

“Sophisticated companies like Apple and Amazon don’t use CAPTCHAs because they’re outdated and ineffective against modern AI bots,” he said.