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UK banks to shut down mobile payment service Paym

Paym, the mobile payment service launched by fifteen of the UK's biggest banks and building societies, is shutting down after an eight year battle to keep abreast of changing consumer trends and technology.

  17 3 comments

UK banks to shut down mobile payment service Paym

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, Paym enable users to transfer payments through their banking app to any other account via the recipient's email address. It currently has around 5.8m registered users, of whom around 500,000 use it regularly.

Hwoever, new registrations have fallen in recent years by 10% in 2021 and 14% in 2022. Monthly transactions have also dropped from 867,000 in 2020 to 668,000 in 2022.

The collective says the decision to go offline on 7 March 2023 reflects a shift by UK consumers towards newer forms of mobile payment and access to Faster Payments through online banking.

Dougie Belmore, chief payments officer of Pay.UK, says: “The emergence of new products and services, driven by the UK’s world-leading payments sector, means it is time to make the move to faster, and better systems for consumers and businesses."

In a fairly damning assessment, Pay.UK research suggests that 96% of Paym users would not be inconvenienced using a different service if Paym was not available.

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Comments: (3)

Jeremy Light

Jeremy Light Co-founder at Fourdotzero

It was hardly a battle - Paym was implemented in different ways with different names by different banks, typically buried unexplained in a mobile bank app, never marketed properly with no industry strategy.

A single name and app, with a few tweaks such as auto-registration, with a proper go-to-market strategy, roadmap and marketing campaign would have done the trick - as it has with enormous success in Sweden (Swish), Norway (Vipps), Denmark (Mobile Pay), Poland (Blik), USA (Venmo), India (Paytm) to name a few. Unfortunately, the UK banks never showed an interest collectively or individually to make Paym a success despite the widespread evidence of mobile payment adoption elsewhere.

Today, UK consumers still need to know and key in/retain a contact's bank details in their mobile bank app to pay them (unless they use Paym of course) instead of simply tapping a phone contact, as has been doable in many other countries for years.

If Paym was offered as an open API, I am sure Fintechs and other innovators would transform its use - still time to do so?

Chris Davis

Chris Davis Partner and Financial Services Expert at Kyndryl

Agreed it was never easy to use and the alternatives are far superior these days...

Robin Setty

Robin Setty Partnerships Lead for banking solutions at ACI Worldwide (EMEA) Limited

The marketing around PayM was appalling.  Hardly anybody seemed to know about it.  That's why it failed.

As for auto-registration, am I right in thinking that this was rejected becaused of data privacy concerns?  

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