Global: 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.

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.