Today, PayM published their statistical update running to the end of 2015. I have listed my key take outs below.
PayM growth has slowed down substantially
We can see that the rate of growth of registered users has decreased in 2015. There have been 139k less registrations in Q2 2015 vs Q2 2014, i.e 18% less registrations (see graph below)
17% of mobile banking users are registered to PayM?
As of end of 2015 the Paym registrations stand as just above 3M:
So is that big or small? Let’s do some rough maths. I think there must be circa 18M mobile active banking users in the UK. Hence that means that ~17% of UK mobile banking users have signed up to Paym. That’s not bad really within a 2.5 years period.
Average transactions value down by 11%
Average transaction value has decreased substantially in the last quarter of 2015 – according to PayM it’s due to the volume of transaction increase.
0.26 transactions per users every 3 months
The average number of transactions per registered users is growing on a quarterly basis, but remains very low. In view of how active mobile users are, 0.26 transactions every 3 months per registered users is not very much. I suspect that many registered users are inactive, it will be interesting to see if there are indeed users that love paym so much that use it when they can avoid using another payment method. (note: I don’t believe this to be the case)
Conclusion
PayM is still a marginal payment method. There might be 17% of mobile users registered, very few of them bother using Paym it seems. Is Paym a failure considering the substantial amount of money it has costed bank to implement? Or do you believe that it will emerge as a credible payment method for a niche set of users and usage scenarios? I tend to lean to the former at this stage based on the set of publicly available data points.
Let me know what you think.
You can find the fully Paym stats here: http://www.paym.co.uk/sites/default/files/embedded-files/Paym%20Statistical%20Update%20-%20February%202016.pdf
Also published on Medium.