(Yicai Global) Nov. 12 -- Tmall, the online retailer under Alibaba Group Holding, transacted CNY213.5 billion (USD30.7 billion) on China's Double 11 online shopping fest, with 60.3 percent of payments yesterday settled through biological data such as face or fingerprint scans, marking mobile payment's entry into the biometric identification era and signaling the looming demise of password payments.

The peak real-time computing processing speed of e-commerce platforms under Hangzhou-based Alibaba was 1.7 billion records per second during this year's Double 11 fest. Last year's event logged 42 million records per second, Alibaba's financial arm Ant Financial Services Group said in a statement yesterday.

Double 11, also known as Singles' Day, was originally an anti-Valentine's Day protest by male Chinese college students but has since evolved into the world's greatest consumption endurance event. Double 11 references the date on which it falls.

Ant Financial began researching biometric recognition technology in 2012 and added fingerprint payments on Singles' Day in 2015. Alibaba's Alipay third-party payment app introduced face recognition technology in its registration and risk control after the company's Chief Executive Jack Ma demonstrated face-scan payment at Germany's Hannover Messe in March 2015.

The annual festival is a technical exam which 'forces' Alipay to continue independent innovation. The new technologies that have emerged for ten years not only serve the Double 11 festival but have also become the infrastructure of network business.

The core technologies Alipay independently developed are 100 percent open, said Hu Xi, Ant Financial's deputy chief of technology.

Ant Financial has opened up distributed middleware, distributed databases, blockchain, biometric scans and other core technologies it has developed since 2015, Hu said.

Ant Financial's blockchain technology fully applied to this year's Double 11 for the first time. It will trace the origins of 150 million cross-border goods from more than 100 countries and regions, including mass imports of foreign milk powder, cosmetics, health products, Moutai-brand liquor and other high-end alcohol.

Editor: Ben Armour