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UK banks to shut down mobile payment service Paym, lessons for GhanaPay?

 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.

However, 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.

GhanaPay

Meanwhile, in Ghana, members of the Ghana Association of Bankers (GAB), in collaboration with the Ghana Interbank Payments and Settlements Systems (GhIPSS) have recently launched a mobile money wallet dubbed GhanaPay.

With it, they are looking to deepening financial inclusion by using the various banks and financial institutions as agents to boost adoption and drive mobile money penetration in Ghana from the current 58% to 85% by 2025.

Some industry players have said that GhanaPay will suffer the same fate as UK’s PayM because the competition in the mobile money and digital payments space is tough. But GAB believes that leveraging GhIPSS “impressive” mobile money interoperability platform, GhanaPay will bridge the huge financial inclusion gap by targeting new customers rather than churning existing ones.

It is still not clear how many people have downloaded and are actually using GhanaPay currently, but GAB is confident that with the right targeting they will grow adoption and usage.

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