The other program, which is still in development, is called Targeted Acceptance and would allow consumers to set personal limits on how, where and what amounts their cards can be used for. The service is already available to commercial customers and will be rolled out to consumers as well, Richey said.

Richey said Visa was not opposed in the future to the idea of using that are used widely in Europe. They require consumers to enter PIN numbers, instead of signing, when making credit card transactions. The approach is widely considered to be safer than purely signature-based transaction, but it would require considerable investments on the part of card issuers to make the change. Richey said today that Visa "fully" supports the technology and said it was not a matter of "if" but "when" and "how" the technology would be adopted in the U.S.

Dave Weick, CIO at McDonalds Corp., discussed during a panel a new plan to minimize threats against payment card data. He described how the fast-food giant was exploring how to completely segregate all payment card data and transactions from the rest of its internal network. Weick said McDonalds had developed a way to accept payment card transactions without letting any of that data touch any of its own internal systems, including its point-of-sale devices.

No one in the company's internal system would have access to any cardholder data, and even the portion of the network that deals with card transactions would be handled by an outside vendor, Weick said. "We are very early on in this," he said, adding that the plan was to first roll out the approach to company-owned restaurants before deploying it across all franchises.