OneTrust, the market-defining leader for trust intelligence, has released its first Trending toward trust report: What organizations need to watch in 2023. As organizational trust becomes a top priority for companies of all sizes and industries, the report highlights seven key industry trends relevant to privacy, security, ethics, and ESG professionals in the coming year.

“Looking at the societal, economic, and regulatory forces impacting companies today allows us to forecast what organizations need to know to make informed decisions tomorrow,” said Blake Brannon, chief product and strategy officer at OneTrust. “By viewing these trends through the lens of trust, we can identify the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as businesses and leaders embrace full-scale trust initiatives and prioritize programs across privacy, security, ethics, and ESG.”

“The future of trust and the importance that consumers are placing on trust when it comes to their wallets both B2C and B2B cannot be ignored,” said Ryan O’Leary, research manager at IDC. “Organizations need to embed trust and privacy into the core of their business or face ignoring readily available tailwinds for their business.”

The report details 2023 trends, including:

1. In the face of new regulation, agility will be your next competitive advantage: Keeping pace with a growing list of regulations (SFDR, CPRA, CDPA, EU-US DPF, CTDPA, UCPA, ADPPA, CSRD, etc.) is a daunting task. Stakeholders from across the organization will need to remain agile throughout 2023 to track and address strategic areas of compliance that arise throughout the year.
2. As data volumes rise, data literacy will be mission-critical to your operations: As organizations start to own their data collection, and data security and governance come to the forefront of data operations, relevant stakeholders will need to make sure data literacy is a priority. This will prove to be a major differentiator as privacy-focused, well-communicated data policies drive trust with customers and employees.
3. Artificial Intelligence will shape innovations in trust: Meaningful AI regulation is becoming a reality and 2023 will be a landmark year in this area. This should give rise to an organizational focus on the ethical use of data in automated systems, build greater transparency and accountability as novel technologies are developed, and help to mature trust between the organization and the individual by implementing the appropriate protections.
4. The stakes for corporate misbehavior are higher – and more personal – than ever: In this new paradigm of personal accountability, blind trust is no longer enough for CEOs, CISOs, CCOs, and boards of directors. Instead, you must drive greater transparency than ever. Achieving that at scale requires trust intelligence: technology, process, workflow, and metrics to measure trust across the business.
5. Trust by Design will be critical for transforming organizational outputs: Trust is the new gold standard for business, as data shows trusted companies outperform the S&P 500 by 30 to 50 percent.1 Therefore, it’s essential that stakeholders from across the business understand how trust is measured and how it should be managed. Trust by Design is now becoming critical for organizations to meet the complex needs associated with the trust office.
6. The emergence of the trust office is more than just a collaborative effort: 2023 will see a rise in the emergence of trust programs and organizations creating trust offices to effectively centralize required cross-functional collaboration. To demonstrate the benefits of the trust office, priorities should be directly tied back to the wider strategic goals of the business, as certain important metrics, such as the correlation between customer trust and increased revenue, can be easy to measure.
7. Certifications will act as a framework for an effective trust program: Compliance certifications have been a competitive differentiator for decades, but now certifications and standards are having an increasingly important impact beyond enhancing an organization’s revenue. Certifications help build an internal culture of trust by demonstrating the values of the company through action.

Read the full report: Trending toward trust: What organizations need to watch in 2023

¹ “Opinion: Why high-quality, trustworthy companies have beaten the S&P 500 by 30%-50%,” Market Watch, July 3, 2021