Glenbrook's Linda Elliot was at the Chicago Federal Reserve Banks’ 2008 Payments Conference where this year’s topic was Payments Fraud: Perception versus Reality. Her observations are here; she makes the important distinction between fraud prevention and data security.

There was ample discussion of PCI data security programs, their costs and benefits, and the status of PCI standards as a near-default standard for data security in all participants in a payments service, whether or not that service is actually a subscriber to the PCI group. However, I was troubled by an apparent rush to equate payments fraud prevention with adherence to PCI data standards. An entire panel seemed to use the terms ‘payments fraud’ and ‘data security’ as interchangeable. When participants began to discuss data security, they seemed to lose sight of other important characteristics of fraud and of fraud measures…

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