Paym celebrates first anniversary

A year after launch, British bank-backed person-to-person mobile payments service Paym says that it has processed nearly £44 million.

Launched under the Payments Council umbrella 12 months ago, Paym lets users make payments from within their financial institutions' app by simply using a mobile phone number as a proxy, without the need to disclose sort codes and account numbers.

With 16 banks and building societies signed up (Nationwide will join in May), the service covers 40 million UK current accounts, although only 2.25 million people have signed up, sending an average of £55 a transaction.

Meanwhile, a new survey suggests that mobile payments users are four times more likely to be happy sharing money with friends and family than the average Brit, and some 83% of Paym users think that sharing money is a sign of true friendship, compared to just 53% of all people.

Craig Tillotson, MD, Paym, says: "We’re using our mobiles more than ever - and not just for phone calls. When you add this trend to the wider growth in the sharing economy, mobile payments look set to be a real growth area over coming years."

Related Companies

Payments UK

Channels

Retail banking Payments

Keywords

Mobile & online banking

Comments: (3)

Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 30 April, 2015, 14:09

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£44 million in one year at national level? I remember reaching that figure at the end of the first day of FPS going live at just one bank in 2008. Perhaps this confirms what has been said for a long time about P2P payment volumes being several orders of magnitude lower than bill pay and other forms retail payments. I've also started wondering of late if mobile is such a hot channel for an infrequent activity like banking: I got put off with the friction in my mobile banking app around a year ago and stopped using it beyond the first time. I've saved myself from becoming unbanked through Online and Branch Banking!

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A Finextra member 01 May, 2015, 15:50

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The figures presented are misleading Paym are saying that £44million has been spent. "With 16 banks and building societies signed up (Nationwide will join in May), the service covers 40 million UK current accounts, although only 2.25 million people have signed up, sending an average of £55 a transaction." 2.25m * £55 = £123.75m So if £44million has actually been spent and the average spend per person is £55 then only 800,000 transactions have been sent money using Paym. That means that only 0.35% of people registering for Paym can actually have used it to send money. If we then assume that a fair few of those transactions are repeat transactions by the same payer, then 'celebrates' is probably the wrong word....

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 01 May, 2015, 16:41

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@MichaelD: Good catch although I think you meant 35% (800K/2.25M*100%). Based on my experience with some other mobile apps, an Install-to-Use conversion - or what some call Activation Rate - of 35% is not bad. Just that, when viewed at over a fairly long duration of one year, it suggests that people who did use it used it only once. Which in turn implies that, like many other mobile apps, PayM is not usable enough or lacks a compelling reason to use. I suspect it's the latter because P2P is known to be a very infrequent payment transaction. Any which way, I agree with you that celebrate is the wrong word. I know many VC-funded companies who have had their plugs pulled after greater traction than this.