British bank-backed person-to-person mobile payments service Paym is experiencing solid if unspectacular take-up, recording more than three quarters of a million transactions in the first half of the year.
Launched under the Payments Council umbrella last Spring, 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 17 banks and building societies signed up, the service covers more than nine out of 10 UK current accounts. However, only 2.6 million people have registered, and far fewer have actually made payments.
So far, just 1.25 payments worth £70 million have been made through Paym, although the figures show that activity is increasing quarter on quarter. In Q2 2015 the service was used for 416,000 payments worth £23.1 million, compared to just 157,000 payments worth £8.5 million in the third quarter of 2014.
There has also been a shift in how the service is used. In the first half of the year almost three quarters of Paym transactions were made on weekdays, compared to just two thirds in the second half of last year.
Currently, the most common reason for using Paym is paying people back money owed for petrol (25%), helping with bills (22%), paying back IOUs (22%), household costs (19%), and splitting lunch or dinner (19%).
Craig Tillotson, managing director, Paym, says: "Paym continues to grow and it’s interesting to see we’re using it more for weekday money management as well as Saturday’s socialising."