At its simplest definition, digital trust is about confidence: confidence that the people and companies we are interacting with online are genuine and operating as intended. If that sounds significant, it’s because it is. We rely on the systems that we use every day to not only be reliable but also to have integrity. Trust is rooted in ethics, fairness and inclusivity and when it breaks down, it can have economic consequences—and potentially social ones.
That, perhaps, is old news, or at least a logical deduction. But if the price of failure is so high, it’s fair to ask if the rewards for success are equally substantial. To answer that question, my company, Callsign—which offers fraud prevention, authentication and intelligence solutions—worked with economists at Cebr to look at the value that building digital trust could bring to society and economies around the world. And the results were startling.
In our report The Digital Trust Index, we quantified the missed opportunity caused by a lack of digital trust. We found that a 5 percentage point increase in digital trust results in an average increase in GDP per capita of $3,000. While the effect of increased digital trust is clearly a good thing, our report also illustrated a related underlying problem: the emergence of a digital trust gap.