The growing awareness and use of contactless bank cards by UK consumers is not apparently resulting in increased interest in mobile NFC payments.

That’s according to results of a recent survey by UK-based polling organization YouGov. While awareness of NFC devices stood at more than one in three, or 35%, according to the survey, YouGov said awareness had “barely increased” from a similar survey in 2012. Only 9% of mobile and smartphone owners know their own devices are NFC-enabled. And, in turn, only about 22% of these respondents said they had ever used their devices to make payments.

There are few NFC services yet available in the UK, however. Besides a small project launched by Orange UK and Barclaycard in 2011, No. 1 mobile operator Everything Everywhere launched NFC payments with its own co-branded prepaid mobile card last summer. Vodafone UK is expected to launch next spring and Telefónica O2 will also likely introduce NFC services next year.

They might have a tough sell ahead of them with UK consumers. Of the respondents to the YouGov survey who said they were not interested in NFC, over half cited concerns about security and privacy. Fifty-six percent of respondents said that they did not believe NFC payments were safe, and 53% were concerned about the security of their financial data if their mobile devices were to become lost or stolen.

Nearly 40% of survey respondents told YouGov that they simply saw no need for NFC payments and were happy with their chip-and-PIN cards.

“Despite the advances in NFC mobile technology, the industry has yet to increase the awareness nor put forth a compelling value proposition to the consumer to adopt NFC payments,” John Gilbert, consulting director for YouGov’s technology & telecoms unit, said in a statement. YouGov conducted the survey in September.

The picture looks better for contactless card payments. About 70% of respondents said they were aware of contactless payments, an increase from 55% in September 2012. Of those surveyed, 25% said they owned contactless bank cards, up from 16% in September 2012. About 40% of respondents said they had ever used a contactless card, though the results did not say how frequently they used them.

YouGov’s figures on actual contactless card use differ somewhat from the results of a December 2012 survey by market research agency ICM Research, released in January 2013. ICM found that 25% of UK consumers owned contactless cards, but only 8% ever used them. Fewer than 4% used their contactless cards at least once week.

This means that the 51 million contactless purchases, worth a total of £338 million (US$514 million), which Visa reported for the UK between June 2012 and June 2013, were likely made by a small percentage of customers. In June 2013, Visa said banks had issued about 28 million payWave cards in the UK. In September, there were 70 million payWave cards and more than 1 million contactless point-of-sale terminals in Europe.

The UK accounted for over a quarter of Europe’s contactless POS terminals, with 280,000 terminals in place as of August 2013, with such merchants as Boots, Co-op, Costcutter, EAT, McDonalds, Marks & Spencer, the Post Office, Pret A Manger, Starbucks and WH Smith supporting the technology.

“The one key drawback to more usage is that it has yet to be universally adopted by retailers, with six in 10 users, 62%, wanting more places that accepted contactless card payments,” said the survey agency.

Merchant acceptance is often cited as a key factor for adoption of NFC mobile payments and more contactless points of sale may be needed to drive NFC adoption by consumers. “In the UK, retail adoption is rather limited, curbing the consumers’ desire to transition (to NFC),” said Gilbert in a statement.

Some observers view NFC payment take-up as a slow process but one that will ultimately take off with consumers. In January 2013, ICM Research associate director described mobile-payment take-up as a “slow burn.”