Mobile photo bill pay is seeing faster adoption than traditional bill pay, and is also beating traditional bill pay in usage on the smartphone, according to data from the mobile software development company Malauzai.

Robb Gaynor, chief product officer for Malauzai, told Bank Innovation that adoption of the company’s PicturePay product is already at 5% of end-users in just three months of existence, compared to 25% for person-to-person or P2P payments and 15% for remote deposit capture of checks. Both of these latter services have been offered for two years. Most important, traditional bill pay (i.e. not suing the smartphone camera) sees only 3.5% adoption on mobile.

Users make an average of 1.5 bill payments with PicturePay a month, and the amount of those payments is 40% lower on average than with traditional bill pay. This likely relates to the trust factor with a new technology, so users aren’t paying their mortgage bills with PicturePay. (Mortgage and mobile don’t seem to mix well, yet.)

Gaynor confirmed that Picture adoption is faster than traditional online bill pay was all those years ago. Malauzai will be sharing more information about this soon.

Malauzai recently integrated PicturePay into its traditional bill pay setup, including integration vendors. This signals a shift from the “camera-only” approach the company was taking late last year.

Paying bills by snapping pictures of them with the smartphone camera is still in its infancy, and there isn’t a lot of data out there about it since few banks are offering it. Among the larger institutions, US Bank alone offers the service. Malauzai and its technology partner, Allied Payments Networks, brought the PicturePay service to two Texas-based institutions: First Financial of Abilene — the first bank in the country to offer the service — and City Bank of Texas, based in Lubbock. At least a half-dozen other banks are in discussions with Malauzai to offer the service, which can be delivered in just 60 days on Malauzai’s mobile platform, the company says.

One of the largest banks in the nation has expressed interest in working with Malauzai about PicturePay. “We turned them down,” Gaynor said. “We want to keep the focus on smaller banks and credit unions.”