Palm payments are coming to Brazil as Tencent joins efforts with Treeal to launch its PalmAI biometric service in this eager for payment innovation market.
Chinese cloud provider Tencent Cloud is partnering with Brazilian fintech Treeal to introduce Tencent’s PalmAI biometric service to the Brazilian market. The announcement was made jointly by both companies on Feb. 5.
Under the agreement, Treeal — a payments technology firm that handles more than 200 million transactions per month, will deploy PalmAI, a contactless biometric system developed by Tencent Cloud. The technology uses palm recognitionfor identity verification and can be used for payment authentication and access control without requiring a card or smartphone.
PalmAI scans a person’s unique vein patterns, lines and contours on the palm, and processes this data to verify identity in under 300 milliseconds. According to company figures, the system achieves a very low false acceptance rate (below one in a billion) and a false rejection rate of about 0.01 percent, indicating high precision and reliability in controlled tests.
Industry advocates say palm-based biometrics differ from more common systems such as fingerprint or facial recognition by being less susceptible to spoofing, environmental constraints, and some demographic accuracy challenges associated with other biometric methods. The data captured during scanning is tokenized and encrypted, and actual biometric images are not stored, which companies say is intended to enhance user privacy.
In statements, Treeal’s CEO João Santos noted that Brazil has a strong appetite for new digital payment experiences and suggested that palm biometrics could become “mainstream within the next five years.” Eric Li, Director of AI Global Commercialization at Tencent Cloud, said the partnership reflects confidence in the technology’s role in secure, friction-free transactions not only for payments but also for broader identity verification and access use cases.
PalmAI services from Tencent Cloud are already used in several Asian markets in environments such as corporate buildings, transit hubs and retail self-checkout points. The system supports more than 50 million active users globallyand is reported to handle over two billion transactions annually across deployments.
The move places Brazil among the early adopters of this specific palm recognition technology and highlights continued interest in biometric methods beyond traditional touch-based or camera-based systems in both financial technology and identity applications, despite the recent Amazon’s abandonment of its pioneer palm-scanning payment and identity service Amazon One.
