Australian consumers have been keen adopters of some new payment technologies, such as contactless cards, but less enthusiastic about others.Visa and MasterCard have released research into payment trends in the past week, showing that use of contactless cards is very high, while use of services such as money transfers using mobile apps is low.According to Galaxy research commissioned by MasterCard, 64 per cent of consumers prefer contactless payments to cash for transactions under A$100.Consumers said contactless cards were fast, convenient and safe.The real battleground for the card schemes, however, is to get consumers to use cards for transactions under $20. MasterCard senior vice president and country manager Andrew Cartwright said Reserve Bank data showed that the number of debit transactions was growing at about 20 per cent a year, while the value of debit transactions was growing at around ten per cent a year.Cartwright said what this showed was that the average value of debit transactions was coming down."Many small merchants still have minimum transactions sizes for card payments but we see growth in zero to $10 card spend," he said.While contactless is a good news story for the card schemes, Visa's research (conducted by UMR and Ovum) found that only 13 per cent of consumers have transferred money using a banking app. Only one per cent have used a third party app dedicated to mobile payments or a social media platform to send or receive funds.In overseas markets the numbers are much higher: in the United States 22 per cent of smartphone owners and 28 per cent of tablet users make payments via mobile; in China 24 per cent of smartphone owners use their phones to send money to other people; and in India the proportion is 34 per cent.Fifty-two per cent of Australian consumers use their smartphones to check their account balances. But when it comes to making small value payments, 73 per cent use cash to pay values under $10.Visa also found that 38 per cent of consumers use cash for payments over $100 - one of the highest rates in the developed world.According to Visa there is an appetite for better P2P payments services. Consumers say they would like more convenient ways of reimbursing friends or family, splitting bills at restaurants, paying tradesmen and transferring money overseas.