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
