Does Your Business Deserve the Trust It's Asking For?

A year of saying the same thing until it landed

The past year I have been an evangelist about digital trust.

In the beginning, nobody really knew what I was talking about. That has changed. People now see why it matters, and more importantly they start to see it on a larger scale. Digital trust is not only cybersecurity. It is not only putting guardrails around your AI, or ticking off the compliance rules. It is an ecosystem, and every part of it is interwoven.

Here is the part I keep coming back to, and it is an uncomfortable one.

You already pay for trust. You get none of the credit

You spend real money and real effort keeping your customers safe, and they have no idea you are doing it. The penetration test, the incident response drill, the access reviews, the data minimisation work nobody outside the team will ever see — you are paying the bill for trust and getting none of the credit for it.

That is not a security failure. It is a communication failure. And it is the reason I keep saying digital trust belongs on the commercial agenda, not only in the risk register.

Every customer is placing a bet on you

Meanwhile every customer makes a quiet decision, every day, about whether to bet on you. Your reputation is what you are asking them to bet on.

A competitor can copy your product overnight. They cannot copy your reputation.

That is worth sitting with, because it reframes what all that invisible work is actually buying you. It is not overhead. It is the only asset in your business that cannot be reverse engineered.

What we cover in this episode

That is the conversation I have with Kristiana Kuneva in the first episode of The Digital Trust Podcast:

• What digital trust actually is, and why the one-word answer — security — is only a quarter of it
• Why it is a communication problem more than a security one
• The invisible infrastructure holding the digital economy together, and what it takes to build it
• Where most organisations are getting it wrong right now
• What the European Digital Identity Wallet means for you well before 2027 arrives

We started with a question every business leader should be asking themselves: does your business deserve the trust it is asking for? It sounds simple, until you try to answer it honestly.

What Kristiana wrote about it

Have you ever been asked a question that felt simple — until you tried to answer it honestly? What followed was a thought-provoking, engaging conversation about the invisible infrastructure holding the digital economy together: what it actually takes to build it, why most organisations are getting it wrong, and what is coming that most boardrooms have not seen yet.

Then we take it into a room

Later this year we take this conversation off the recording and into a room. The Digital Trust Forum, Sofia, 27 October 2026. Half a day with people who actually build, regulate and use this stuff — from Bulgaria and the Netherlands.

Everywhere else you get the polished version. I want the room where people say what they have really tried, and what did not work.

Registration is free, and we review every application so the room stays balanced between the people who build this, the people who regulate it, and the people who have to live with it.

If this conversation resonates, take it further: digitaltrustforum.eu.