Claimed to be the first of its kind such technology, the advanced facial recognition has been developed by CaixaBank in collaboration with its technological partners Fujitsu and FacePhi.

The new facial recognition technology enables customers withdraw cash from ATMs without using their PIN number.

The new technology has been designed to provide customers with better user experience, enhanced security in transactions and avoid the risk of memorizing multiple passwords.

CaixaBank CEO Gonzalo Gortázar said: “technological leadership helps us to provide a better service to our customers, in a closer, more specialised way.”

CaixaBank has placed the new verification system in four store branches, with 20 terminals, in Barcelona.

The firm is planning to place the facial recognition technology across its store offices from the second half of this year.

CaixaBank’s new verification system enables users to withdraw money from an ATM by recognizing them from the image captured by the terminal’s camera.

The ATM is provided with hardware and software required to validate up to 16,000 points on the image of the user’s face, enabling secure identification.

The customer will have flexibility to select the most convenient personal identification technology, as CaixaBank ATMs will be provided with both options such as facial recognition or PIN.

The project to implement facial recognition technology is part of neX, which is the new organizational structure established in CaixaBank.

CaixaBank carried out study with real customers to determine the degree of acceptance of identification by facial recognition, before being implemented in the first ATMs.

The 70% of respondents have showed interest to use the facility technology rather than entering their personal identification code on a keyboard, said the company.

CaixaBank global customer experience head Jordi Nicolau said: “a state-of-the-art experience is bringing us closer to our objective to offer a distinguishing customer journey, with clear benefits to service quality and proximity to customers.”