Paym, the UK service offered by 17 leading banks and building societies that enables money transfer between users via mobile numbers, had 2.6 million registered users at end-June 2015.

And the service carried 415,000 transactions in the three months to end June, worth more than £23 million.

All the figures are climbing on a sequential basis, but that is hardly surprising since this is a relatively new service (it launched in April 2014). Since launch, a total of 1.25 million transactions worth £70 million have been sent.

Deep analysis is difficult since Paym does not break out how many of its registrations are regular, or occasional, users.

Paym has, however, conducted a survey which shows a shift in usage patterns over the last six months (from January 2015). Users are now using the service to pay back immediate family money owned for petrol (25 per cent), bills (22 per cent) and household costs (19 per cent), a change from January 2015 when the payment service was mainly being used to settle up for socialising (lunch or dinner was 20 per cent of total at start of year).

This shift is probably explained by a slightly older demographic for Paym over the past six months. The 35-64 year olds account for 39 per cent of registrations, up 35 per cent six months ago. This indicates more money flowing from the pocket of parents via Paym to their children.

Paym is run by the Mobile Payments Service Company on behalf of Payments UK (formerly the Payments Council), which represents the country’s leading financial institutions.