If you forgot your wallet at home and want to pick up a quart of milk at Whole Foods you can now pay with your hand.

That’s right, Amazon has just launched an innovative new service called Amazon One that lets you pay for anything in participating merchants with just the palm of your hand.

Amazon touts the service as a fast, convenient, contactless identity service that uses your palm – just hover to enter, identify, and pay.

Innovative New Palm Reader Installed At Merchants

The service may take a while to roll out because it involves installing a new innovative palm reader at each merchant terminal.

This is not an easy task for a company that does most of its commerce online, but Amazon does have a growing number of physical locations to collect the palm scans of consumers.

Currently, Amazon’s U.S. physical stores include 511 Whole Foods Markets, 23 Amazon Fresh grocery stores, 24 Amazon Go convenience stores, 24 Amazon Books stores, 33 Amazon 4-Star outlets and nine Amazon Pop-Up locations.

Is Your Palm Secure?

According to Amazon, a scan of your palm may be the most secure way to pay. They indicate, that “Your palm is made up of tiny, distinct features on and below the surface, many that are indiscernible to the human eye or a standard camera”.

Amazon uses its proprietary tech to capture those distinct features. No two palms are alike, making your palm unique to you.

Amazon One uses the information embedded in your palm to create a unique palm signature that it can read each and every time you use it.

Amazon is Riding The Wave of Biometrics

Amazon is going to initially roll out the new tech at 65 participating Amazon locations. Consumers that want to enroll can visit one of those locations and scan one or both of their palms, enter their mobile phone number and provide a credit card and/or merchant membership number.

Amazon is riding the wave of biometrics. In the next 4 years, Juniper Research predicts that over $3 Trillion in payments will be authenticated with biometrics. This includes facial recognition, iris detection, and voice and fingerprint matching.

Thanks to Mary Ann Miller for giving me the tip on this post. There is so much innovation in payments. We live in exciting times.