With much talk percolating around possible security holes in using phones as digital wallets, a point vocalized yesterday by a Smart Card Alliance exec stood out to us. Perhaps consumers don’t care as much about security as we might think — at least when it comes to adopting newer payment technology.

This idea surfaced in a call Bank Innovation had with Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the nonprofit, multi-industry smart-card association. Though he pointed out how EMV — an acronym for the Europay, Mastercard and Visa standard — integrated with mobile phones for payments adds better security than magnetic stripe card payments, he also highlighted how consumers may feel impartial to that security upgrade.

“Consumers won’t generally respond to EMV because they are more secure payments,” Vanderhoof tells Bank Innovation. “It doesn’t bring much value to consumers in their minds.”

He credits that impartiality, in part, to the limited role U.S. consumers play in cases of fraudulent card transactions.

“Government regulation took consumers out of the responsibility for protecting their payments,” he says. “When they guaranteed 100% protection that meant consumers no longer really had a role to play in payment security.”

Rather than give security top billing, he suggests U.S. mobile payment issuers market other features to spark consumer interest, whether or not EMV is part of the IT equation. Take Google’s wallet that was announced last week. Marketing the couponing functionality of the new digital wallet should draw engagement from the consumer crowd, while added secure capabilities will serve as more of a bonus, Vanderhoof says.

Still, data from the soon-to-be-released Bank Innovation Monitor shows that the majority of Americans (67%) say they harbor mobile-device security concerns. What remains unknown to us is whether those concerns will develop into consumers shying away from mobile payments or deciding who cares? Only time will tell.