February 2, 1967. It’s a date that will live in infamy. On that Thursday evening, a highly decorated military commander’s career nearly came to a screeching and unjust halt. This hero among heroes was court-martialed and nearly convicted based on video evidence that turned out to be the world’s first known deepfake.
Those officiating this military tribunal could hardly be faulted. Up until that moment, seeing was believing – all the time – every time. Your eyeballs were your single most reliable source of truth. Then everything changed.
Don’t remember the incident of which I write? Then clearly you’re no Trekkie.
In the Star Trek episode “Court Martial” (Season 1, Episode 20), Captain Kirk faced criminal charges and dismissal from Starfleet after Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney supposedly died during an ion storm. The primary prosecution evidence was the Enterprise’s bridge computer visual log, which clearly showed Kirk pressing the “jettison pod” button while the ship was still at Yellow Alert – sending Finney to his apparent death. Kirk insisted he called Red Alert first and gave Finney plenty of time to evacuate, but the court trusted the seemingly unimpeachable visual record of the computer over human memory.
Nobody knew then that Finney had apparently gotten his hands on a 300-year-old copy of DeepFaceLab. Luckily Spock solved the riddle before the 60-minute episode timer ran out and Kirk went on to romance and blast his way around the galaxy for 59 more episodes, not to mention six feature-length films.
Trust Redefined
Spock only discovered the deepfake because the computer started to glitch. I never thought about it before, but maybe the computer started to glitch as a warning to Kirk and Spock. It wanted no part of this injustice.
It took less than 60 years for Gene Roddenberry’s fantasy to become our reality. Except our computers couldn’t care less whether they’re complicit in some nefarious undertaking. And if we can’t trust our own eyes, what can we trust? Who can we trust? Why does trust even matter anymore?
If you’re running a business, you know good and well that trust is critical to your bottom line. There’s plenty of data to back that up.
Fintechs can turn to Forrester, for example, who will tell you that when a financial institution trusts you, they’re twice as likely to pay a price premium rather than choose your cut-rate competitor.
Likewise, Mercuri International found that 99% of B2B buyers consider trust decisive in vendor selection. Deals with unverified or low-trust fintechs take an estimated 40% longer to close due to procurement paralysis, redundant security audits, and board-level hesitation. You don’t want to be part of that stat, do you?
And Gallup’s multi-year B2B study revealed that while high-trust client accounts expand annually, 60% of accounts characterized by low trust see revenues drop by 20% or more year-over-year.
The view from the retail banking side is just as stark:
The Loyalty Multiplier: Edelman’s Trust Barometer research shows that 81% of consumers say brand trust is a non-negotiable prerequisite to opening an account.
The Expansion Moat: When consumers trust a financial institution, 59% say they will adopt new products and services immediately, compared to just 34% for institutions with neutral or weak trust.
The Defection Threshold: PwC found that 32% of customers will walk away permanently after just one bad experience – meaning a single failed digital interaction or clumsy automated loop can wipe out years of accountholder acquisition investment.
Organic Advocacy Multiplier: Trusted institutions generate a 2.6x referral multiplier, cutting customer acquisition costs (CAC) nearly in half compared to institutions that rely on paid ad spends.
The bottom line: There’s big money to be made from building trust with your customers.
But is that really why you do it? What about building trust because it’s the right thing to do?
Doing the Right Thing Because It’s the Right Thing
I get it. You’re not running a charity. But if your entire strategy for building trust comes down to juicing lifetime value and shortening sales cycles, I promise you’re in for a rude awakening. Maybe not today, but probably when you least expect it and can least afford it.
This reminds me of one of my favorite business quotes, courtesy of Mark Cuban, who famously said, “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered... When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you.” Always.
Mark the Shark understood what happens when an organization tries to turn genuine goodwill into a financial extraction scheme. The moment the person on the other side of the desk realizes you’re looking at them like a revenue optimization problem, trust evaporates.
This brings me to another NBC show that probably nobody remembers. Debuting with a two-hour pilot in 1985, Stingray was picked up as a weekly series in 1986.
The premise was simple: A mysterious man driving a 1965 Corvette Stingray helped desperate people in desperate situations with nowhere else to turn. But “Ray” never accepted money for his help. Instead, any beneficiary of his services had to commit to fulfilling one future favor, no matter what it might be. The show was built around the idea that he would call in these old favors to help deal with the current situation.
Ray operated on the premise that money corrupts intent. That idea made quite an impression on 23-year-old me. I realize now that over time, that concept helped inform my approach to business and to life. In any situation, I ask two things first: What’s the problem and how can I help solve it?
I certainly don’t mean to imply that making money is a bad thing. I want to make money. You want to make money. Most people I know want to make money. But if your first reaction to every situation is to consider the profit margin, people will eventually recognize you as a purveyor of fake trust and you won’t make the money you seek.
Trust, 2027 Edition
Where does all this leave us as we bobsled our way into 2027?
Somewhere along the digital downhill, we made a bad trade: We traded trust for convenience.
Think about traditional retail. When you walk into a Nordstrom or a Macy’s, you trust that whatever you buy will be high quality because those brands actively stake their reputations on curation. Walk into a Walmart or a Target, and you trust you’ll get an honest, low price because their entire identity is built on value.
Then along came the great wild, wild west of ecommerce. Every online store looks fabulous (spelling errors notwithstanding). But for all you know, they’re fly-by-night freaks peddling cheap junk at 10X markups, all the while betting that the return shipping charges to China and exorbitant restocking fees will convince you to keep your extra-large Rolling Stones t-shirt that turned out to be Stolling Rones t-shirt that you couldn’t squeeze onto a Ken doll.
We’ve allowed that same extraction mindset to bleed into financial technology.
With Flock cameras on every corner and Meta glasses lining every sidewalk, with deepfakes reduced to child’s play and clumsy chatbots attempting to “manage” every interaction, trust in our own environment is at an all-time low.
When people feel watched, manipulated, and reduced to data points in their daily lives, the margin for error in financial services shrinks to zero. If you hand an anxious accountholder or an overburdened credit union executive a hallucinating, unsupervised AI tool, you confirm their worst suspicion: that you see them as a cost center to be minimized rather than a relationship to be protected.
Fintech Meetup 2027
As you may have already surmised, trust is very important to me. So I was excited to learn that “Built on Trust” is the theme of Fintech Meetup 2027, and even more excited when the folks there asked me to write about that theme. It’s the first time I had occasion to think about trust in the context of the entire global fintech market. This theme makes perfect sense in today’s world.
Here’s the bottom line: We talk about creating trusted brands and becoming trusted partners and building trusted relationships. All of that it so, so important. But when you look a little closer, you realize that those trusted brands and trusted partners and trusted relationships all have one thing in common: They start with trusted people.
People trust other people. That’s it. They trust people.
They trust the vendor who answers the phone at midnight to help fix an outage. They trust the loan officer who looks beyond an automated credit score to understand a family’s real-life hardship. They trust the partner who is willing to tell them the uncomfortable truth instead of pitching an expensive fix.
Think about. People don’t come to Fintech Meetup to meet with faceless corporations; they come to Fintech Meetup to meet other people – people they can trust.
If you want people to trust your brand and trust your business as a true partner, they need to trust you. I can’t make it any simpler than that. Earn that trust and the money will follow. Guaranteed.