The UK Payments Council has launched its Paym P2P mobile payments service.

Customers of participating banks can send money direct from their account using only the recipients mobile number.

From launch, there are nine banks and building societies on board – Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Cumberland Building Society, Danske Bank, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, Santander and TSB – giving the service a potential reach of 30m people.

Of course, this means the service is still far from universal, which could prove particularly difficult as users have to be registered to not just send but receive money via the service.

There are an estimated 20m customers of banks who arent signed up as launch partners, including the RBS Groups 13m current account holders. However, most of the UKs biggest banks are on the Paym roadmap for the next year or two – and RBS is scheduled to adopt the service later this year.

A Consumer Intelligence survey suggests that 47 per cent of current account holders refuse to adopt Paym, and only 25 per cent actively intend to use the service. The primary reason, as usual with mobile money, is security concerns.

Its worth noting, though, that as it will be presented as a new feature in an app theyre already using, consumers wont necessarily be aware of the Paym platform. The public concern around the security of mobile payments is a more long-standing issue, however, and one which needs to be addressed before services like Paym can find real traction.