Consumer sentiment towards contactless payments has been given relentless attention in recent years by the Reserve Bank and by private sector market research firms, including global banking intelligence and market research firm, RFi Group. Earlier this year, RFi interviewed 30,000 banking consumers in 16 markets about their "payments behaviour".  Alex Boorman, RFi's Asia Pacific research director, outlined some of the main results yesterday to an audience of clients and industry payments industry professionals. The markets examined covered established and emerging economies.One key question asked was: "have you ever made a purchase using a contactless credit or debit card?" Australians lead the world on this, returning the highest contactless card penetration statistics (59 per cent). New Zealand, Singapore and Canada all had contactless usage rates of over 50 per cent.  But the US (16 per cent) was among the laggards, just below Mexico (18 per cent) and Indonesia (21 per cent). The countries with the lowest use of contactless cards were Malaysia (13 per cent) and the UAE (ten per cent).Take up of mobile wallets in advanced economies, in particular, was another key area for further RFi's research, with additional survey questions exploring "changes in the mobile payments landscape ... where, when and how mobile wallets will achieve the greatest success." Consumers were asked if they had ever used a mobile wallet.Bank customers in the urban centres of emerging economies topped this list, headed by India (33 per cent), China (32 per cent) and Mexico (27 per cent), where there was a clear interest in this technology. It was unclear from the presentation, though, whether this awareness was an echo of the extensive use of mobile networks to transfer funds and "airtime" among the unbanked.The "yes" from emerging markets was in stark contrast to countries that had been identified as having an already high use of contactless cards. RFi found that in Australia, just ten per cent of banking customers use mobile wallets.  A similar number said they found the prospect of wallets "highly appealing" (leaving around 90 cent of customers who are not especially excited about the idea of wallets). Digging deeper, RFi found that just 24 per cent of Australian banking customers said they "understood mobile wallet technology" and even fewer (18 per cent) said they trusted the technology. These results were in line with other comparable established payments markets: Taiwan (12 per cent), Singapore (eight per cent) and Canada (four per cent).As RFI conceded, with statistics like these it's clear the industry has a lot more work to do to convince customers in markets with established "tap and go" contactless cards to change their behaviour and embrace mobile wallets.