Security software provider OneTrust released the results from its survey of 2,500 executives across the U.S. and EMEA on Tuesday, revealing how highly trust stands as a business consideration in 2023.
“The really big headline here is that companies are starting to link trust to their ability to innovate as an organization and their fundamental ability to be competitive,” says OneTrust CEO Kabir Barday. That’s different than how companies used to view trust: as just a checkbox for a compliance exercise, he says.
According to the report, 70% of leaders say achieving trust—generally given from stakeholders to managers—is a strategic business objective for their organization, while 69% agree that without trust, it’s difficult to innovate and grow their business.
Since this is OneTrust’s first report on the subject there’s no back data to compare those figures with but, as Barday says above, the company’s view is that recognition in trust as an asset that’s valuable to a company rather than just a drain on the top line is growing. Why?
Well, among other macro factors like the spread of access to information, the main catalyst for that growth seems to be the expansion of stakeholder capitalism. Companies are no longer just playing to investors—and even investors are no longer only looking at profit and share price as a predictor for growth.
“The pressures on organizations, from regulatory demands, from their customers, through due diligence from their employees, or activism through all of these different areas have become really intense,” Barday says, pointing to due diligence questionnaires companies receive when recruiting new corporate clients as an example.
The depth and scope of the questions investors want answered have ballooned over recent years, Barday says, evolving from covering basic data security and privacy protocols to ethical AI, supply-chain sustainability, and other ESG considerations. But, while business leaders might have grown more aware of the value of trust to their business, few know how to measure the variables required to generate it and verify the outcomes it produces.
According to OneTrust’s report, 69% of trust leaders say effectively measuring trust is “challenging” while more than 70% of respondents aren’t yet measuring trust at all. A third of respondents plan to start doing so within the next 12 months and most think it will take one to three years to gather enough data to measure anything meaningful.
That discrepancy between the high number of leaders who know trust is valuable and the low number who know how to measure it is what Barday calls “the trust gap,” where “companies know trust is strategic but they’re still trying to build and mature their infrastructure to be able to measure the impact.”
Conveniently, plugging that gap is the purpose of OneTrust’s tech.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
IN OTHER NEWS
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For the last three years, shopkeepers across America have been up in arms about the alleged crime wave that has gripped the nation’s cities, with major chains including Walmart, Walgreens, and Target blaming rising crime for their decisions to close retail locations. However, investment bank William Blair notes that the level of “shrink”—unaccounted stock loss retailers report that is usually linked to theft—has increased but only to pre-pandemic levels, as in-store shopping returned. The real reason brands are shopping locations, the bank says, is bad management.
The commission conspiracy
A Missouri jury found last week that the National Association of Realtors and the largest national real estate broker franchisors, including Berkshire Hathaway’s HomeServices, had conspired to artificially inflate the home-sale commissions paid to real estate agents. The jury ordered NAR and others to pay nearly $1.8 billion in damages to a class of more than 250,000 home sellers. Fortune’s Alena Botros and Sydney Lake have the full story.
The Bletchley Declaration
Countries attending the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit this week released a declaration named after the venue, Bletchley Park, that “mostly just serves as a pretty good snapshot of what 28 countries (and the EU) currently understand AI’s promises and risks to be,” Fortune’s David Meyer reports.
Print.ing money
Google has rolled out a new top-level domain that will let companies build websites that reflect a single word, such as writ.ing or play.ing. Early registration for the domains runs as high as $13,000 a year, depending on the prefix but, starting Dec. 5, Google will expand access and costs will likely come down for less-prime spots. Early adopters of the new domain so far include Adobe Acrobat, which snagged edit.ing and sign.ing; Giving Tuesday, which took giv.ing; and travel discount site Going, which went with go.ing.
TRUST EXERCISE
“It’s true that not everyone needs to interpret Tolstoy, but if you can’t read then you have to trust others to interpret a world of information for you, just as an illiterate person did in the past. Similarly, it’s true that not everyone needs to transform tensors, but if you can’t do simple math then you need someone to interpret personal finances, probabilities, and health decisions for you.”
That passage is from A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, by Michael Muthukrishna. The book isn’t really about trust (as the title shows) but the excerpt above is about education and makes an interesting question of how education systems chose to value certain skill sets over others and trust specialists to patch our ignorance.
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