I guess I am not the only one who sees the loss of consumer trust as a major byproduct of the hemorrhaging of personal data through hacks, scams and lost or stolen equipment. Visa is concerned enough about it to co-host a security summit with Harvard Business School Publishing on the issue of "Maintaining Trust in Payments."The summit will bring together the top financial services, retail and technology industry players in a bid to come up with some specific steps that can be taken to better secure the payment system as a whole, while protecting consumers and, not incidentally, safeguarding their trust in the current payment system.

Topics at the one-day conference will include: understanding the business realities of protecting data, sharing best practices for responding to a data breach crisis, building and maintaining customer confidence, discussing the role of the private and public sectors, and reviewing the role of technology in securing payments. Click here for the full agenda and speakers (which include someone from ChoicePoint).

This is actually Visa's second summit on payment card security issues. The first one was held in Oct. 2005; the conference page includes PDF downloads of all presentations, so it looks like it's worth a visit.

This summit, BTW, comes at a time when Visa is running an ad that ridicules the use of cash in place of credit cards. The idea being that cash is bad, cash takes too much time, etc. etc. I came across this review of the ad and the motives behind it, which does a pretty good job of spelling out just why businesses need to maintain trust in electronic payment systems. Well, that, and the specter of pending legislation.