[Cherian_Abraham]

What you are talking about is essentially the tokenization concept which should become real in 2014. All retailers such as Amazon would become Token requestors in this concept. Advantages would be to essentially make these breaches irrelevant as tokens could be invalidated quickly by the card issuers easily. Further, for merchants - the advantage would be reduced fraud and hopefully better interchange economics.

[jimktrains2]

A lot of processors have offered that service for years.

Amazon, being their own processor, probably stores their own numbers, but if Visa themselves would start tokenizing, that would be huge and awesome.

[Varcht]

Good to hear, I sincerely hope that can get it right.