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Visa's chief risk officer says the key to retaining trust is to continuously
earn it.

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Good Sunday afternoon and welcome to The Trust Factor, Fortune’s latest
newsletter examining the all-important nexus between trust and business. 

 

I’m Jacob Carpenter, and each Sunday I’ll be popping into your inbox with a
fresh rundown of the news, analysis, and action items—with the ultimate goal of
helping you build trust in our fast-evolving business ecosystem.

 

We’re starting The Trust Factor now because the moment demands it. As faith in
our vital institutions continues to erode, the business community will play a
vital role in repairing the frayed threads of our global fabric. 

 

In the coming weeks, we’ll dive into countless corners of the corporate
landscape, examining a broad range of issues. 

 

We’ll examine the challenges weighing on industries facing a crisis of consumer
faith, such as Big Tech and crypto. We’ll dive into the increasingly fragile
relationship between employee and employer, as both sides navigate upheaval in
the labor market. We’ll highlight executives and organizations earning the
confidence of consumers—and roll out some lowlights that show what not to do.

 

So, where to begin? Well, that’s the question I posed this week to Paul Fabara,
the chief risk officer at Visa. 

 

It’s Fabara’s job to ensure that Visa maintains the trust of customers,
merchants, and everyone else that comes into contact with the financial services
company (though he’d be the first to tell you it’s everyone’s job at Visa).
Judging by Morning Consult’s third-annual “Most Trusted Brands” survey, which
polled more than 5,000 U.S. adults on their perceptions of hundreds of
companies, Fabara and his colleagues are doing a bang-up job. Visa is the only
company ranked in the top 10 for the past two years.

 

Fabara offered a few key takeaways about laying a foundation of trust at any
company:

 

 * There’s no more valuable corporate currency than trust. Consumer confidence
   is “the most important thing we have as a company” by a wide margin. “It’s
   something that’s embedded in everything we do. Building that trust, it’s an
   every day, all-the-time job for everyone at Visa.”

 

 * Start from a position of “zero trust.” No matter the age, size, or reputation
   of your organization, approach each day as if you’re building trust from
   scratch. “It’s a process that never ends. I think the consumers will benefit
   from that, and they can see when you’re really, genuinely invested in that
   process, that you’re not going to sleep on your laurels.”

 

 * The highest levels of management set the tone. Top executives establish
   values, then share them with employees and clients through a clearly
   articulated mission. “It starts with the top of the house—what are the key
   principles around data security, protocols, how we encrypt information, and
   so on—and eventually sort of materializes down to specific actions you have
   to take, depending on the business you’re in.”

 

 * Employees buy in when they understand their importance. Helping employees
   connect their daily actions to a company’s larger mission is “probably the
   most difficult part” of building an internal commitment to trust. “In some
   cases, it might be something to the naked eye that doesn’t appear to actually
   serve a purpose, but when you aggregate all the pieces, it plays a big role.”

 

Translating those fundamental tenets into action across the company isn’t easy
or straightforward, but any organization must start by valuing trust. As Fabara
said: “We cannot take that for granted, because we can lose consumer confidence
overnight.”

 

We’ll dive into many more specifics in the following weeks and months. For now,
thanks for joining us here, and we’ll see you next Sunday. Enjoy the rest of The
Trust Factor.

 

Jacob Carpenter

 

 



 CONTENT FROM PwC 

Trust: the new currency for business

PwC's recent Trust Survey found a jarring trust perception gap between
businesses and consumers, with 87% of business leaders saying customers highly
trust their companies when only about 30% do. Learn how business leaders can
close the gap here. 

 

NEWS YOU CAN USE

This week’s top headlines from Fortune that touch on key issues of corporate
confidence and accountability.

Executives think consumers trust businesses more than they actually do

A new PwC survey finds that business leaders often have wildly misguided
perceptions about just how much consumers trust their companies. The
5,000-respondent survey found 87% of managers believed customers highly trust
their companies—when in fact only 30% do.  

The best way to talk to employees about Roe v. Wade and not screw it up,
according to a top CEO and communications adviser

The Supreme Court overturned 49 years of abortion precedent Friday—and
executives should be prepared when staffers seek a response from their employer.
At a minimum, managers can maintain credibility with employees by acknowledging
the impact of the decision, reiterating organizational values, and disseminating
detailed information that outlines available benefits.

 



The get-rich-quick days of crypto are over. Investors are losing their shirts,
but industry players say this is healthy

The cryptocurrency sector is undergoing its highest-profile crisis to date, as
collapsed tokens and frozen assets weaken faith in the underlying system. As
Michael Safai, managing partner at cryptocurrency trading firm Dexterity
Capital, told Fortune: “(To be a) trusted ecosystem, investors have to feel
confident that when they put money in, they’re able to get it out. This is
definitely setting back a lot of that trust.”



‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ national security expert Clint Watts warns CFOs
over Russia’s cyber capabilities

Russia’s cyber offensive hasn’t proved particularly potent since the
federation’s invasion of Ukraine, but Clint Watts, a distinguished research
fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, delivered a warning this week:
“Don’t get too comfortable.” Watts, speaking at the Fortune CFO Collaborative,
said he fears that upcoming midterm elections and potential energy shortages
during the winter months could make companies vulnerable to destabilizing
cyberattacks.

 

THE TRUST EXERCISE

A weekly look at how one company is tackling a particularly thorny topic that
could undercut faith in its organizational foundation.

Microsoft’s about-face. Companies operating in the artificial intelligence space
are developing technologies with enormous power for good and ill. In Microsoft’s
case, the software giant determined that some of its A.I. facial recognition
products, capable of predicting gender, age, or emotion, go too far. The company
announced this week that it could no longer sell such tools in good faith,
determining that they risk “subjecting people to stereotyping, discrimination,
or unfair denial of services.” As Natasha Crampton, Microsoft’s chief
responsible A.I. officer, wrote in a blog post: “We recognize that for A.I.
systems to be trustworthy, they need to be appropriate solutions to the problems
they are designed to solve.”

 

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