Paym hits £300m mark

Despite boasting that it has now processed over £300 million in transactions, UK bank-backed person-to-person mobile payments service Paym has seen a slowdown in the number of people signing up for its service.

  10 4 comments

Paym hits £300m mark

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Launched in April 2014, with the backing of Britain's major high street players, Paym lets users make person-to-person and person-to-business payments from within their bank's app by simply using a mobile phone number as a proxy, without the need to disclose their sort code and account number.

So far it has been used for over 5.8 million transactions worth more than £300 million, a figure that has nearly doubled since February.

However, the rate of growth for registered users has slowed considerably over the last few months, rising just a quarter of a million, to 3.5 million.

Among the reasons people use Paym is to chip in for petrol, pay friends back for cinema, theatre or gig tickets, and split restaurant bills. Another growing use for the service is to pay small businesses, with 15% of app users doing this, up from 13% last year.

Craig Tillotson, executive chairman, Paym, says: "Having now passed the £300 million milestone, it’s clear the mobile revolution is in full swing and we expect this trend to continue to grow and transform the way we pay."

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Comments: (4)

Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson General Manager at BioTechnologies

Lame old technology / idea.

Lars Aase

Lars Aase Consultant at CAPSAB

Interesting, but still way behind Swedish Swish (maybe Europe's most successful P2P real-time 24/7 service).

Fact comparison

Paym (UK), £300M transferred since start in April 2014. 3.5M registered users.

Swish (Sweden), 8B SEK (approx £725M) is currently "swished" per month. Swish started in March 2013 and has approx 4.5 active users. The service is now expanding into payment online and instore.

A Finextra member 

@Mark, how's it lame?

@Lars, Paym isn't a P2P payment scheme, it's merely a way of associating your mobile telephone number with your underlying bank account and sort code. The payment is still routed through Faster Payments, which I guess makes that the world's most successful P2P payment scheme! 

The only criticism I have of Paym is the appalling job of marketting it that has been done by the industry, virtually no-one knows that you can use your mobile number as an alias for your account details!

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

@DavidGodfrey + 1.

While I'm happy for banks to operate like banks, their marketing can surely benefit by operating like tech marketing - going by the significantly greater awareness and buzz enjoyed by Venmo, PayTM and other competing offerings from the tech industry.

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