For all the buzz about Apple Pay and mobile wallets, cash (and debit cards) are still king, according to a survey of consumer payment behavior recently released by the Boston Fed.

In 2011 and 2012, debit cards accounted for 30 percent of consumers’ monthly payments, while cash came in second at 27 percent and credit cards regained some market share, coming in at 22 percent, according to the 2011 and 2012 Surveys of Consumer Payment Choice, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Consumer Payments Research Center.

This is the fifth such survey from the group at the Boston Fed; the survey debuted in 2008. The Boston Fed had studied consumer payment behaviors before that, of course. One big motivating factor for undertaking this research was the widespread decline in consumer demand for paper checks, said Director Scott Schuh.

“We wanted to get a better understanding of what consumers would switch to when they reduced their use of checks,” he said.

The reason the most recent report covers the timeframe between 2011 and 2012 is that it takes the Fed a while to pore over all that data.

It still provides an interesting retrospective look at how the financial crisis and ensuing recession may have shaped consumers’ behaviors. For instance, cash payments (which comprised 27 percent of consumers’ payments) declined from 2009 while credit card payments (22 percent) increased over that same period.

Rather than pointing to any sort of radical shift in the way people pay for things, Schuh said that actually represents a return to normal. In 2008 and 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, the Fed saw a very large decrease in credit card payments, coupled with an increase in cash payments, he said.

It may be that consumers chucked the credit cards during the depths of the recession in favor of cash, or it may be that banks withdrew credit as the economy lurched through the aftermath of the crisis.

But while the Fed’s report can be a pretty interesting historical look at consumer payment behaviors – and it confirms much of what bankers and payments pros have already suspected for some time – the report doesn’t make predictions for the payments space.

And between the adoption of EMV, the proliferation of mobile wallets and the spate of high-profile data breaches, in the payments space, change may be the only constant.

One potential snag may be increased regulatory scrutiny of prepaid debit card products, said Madeline Aufseeser, a senior analyst at the Boston-based Aite Group.

Last year, the FDIC came down on a major issuer of prepaid cards for its compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, and on top of that, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed Regulation E-style rules for prepaid debit products.

“What I think it’s going to do is reduce the number of players that participate in that market,” she said. “It causes a lot of additional expense and duplicates of work within these companies. It drives up the cost of managing that business… and if that’s the case those companies that are issuing those products are going to raise their fees to consumers.”

As more and more banks venture into the mobile payments space, they’ll need to partner with third parties, and in turn, they’ll need to be extra-vigilant about who they partner with, said Gerald R. Gagne, a member of the Boston-based firm Wolf & Co.

“A lot of these third parties are small companies that have never been exposed to the regulatory requirements that financial institutions are exposed to,” he said. “[Regulators are] pressing the banks to do a lot of due diligence around who they partner with. A lot of these payment providers are startups. Many times with a startup, the last thing they’re thinking about is the regulatory requirements.”

Gagne also thinks that the spate of high-profile data breaches seen throughout 2013 and 2014 at retailers such as Target, Neiman Marcus and Home Depot may have accelerated the shift toward widespread adoption of EMV.

Whether those data breaches have any impact on consumer behavior is yet to be seen. Alluding to yet-to-be-published research, Schuh noted that toward the end of 2013, the Fed had undertaken a survey of consumers’ perceptions of the security of payment cards.

“We saw a decline in people’s ratings of the security of cards, but so far we haven’t found a big response in terms of the reduction of use in cards,” he said. “It’s possible that a year later, there might have been some evidence of that… It’s cert possible and something we’re looking at and should be able to say with more authority later this year.”

Email: lalix@thewarrengroup.com