The research finds that contactless debit payments have grown by 11% in the past year. Mobile payments have been made by 34% of smartphone owners in the 12 months to April 2016, with 17% using them to pay in a restaurant.
Rich Shepherd, financial services analyst at Mintel, said: “Part of the reason for the rapid increase in the use of contactless cards is the simple fact that they are now much more widely accepted.
“They’ve moved beyond coffee shops and sandwich bars and are now entirely commonplace. However, the real shift in behaviour has only come over the last few years.
“It’s easy to forget that contactless cards were first launched back in 2007, meaning that the technology has been on British high streets for almost a decade. People’s payment habits change slowly, as can be seen with the cheque’s stubborn refusal to disappear from the payments landscape.”
However, 54% of Brits are not comfortable abut the potential for a completely cashless society, which rises to 61% of those over 45 and 68% of those over the age of 65.
The research also finds that 77% of Brits would be concerned about the security of their data if it was lost or stolen. Similarly, 76% say that they are concerned about the risk that hackers might be able to make fraudulent transactions.