Let's talk about the phrase "industry standard." It is everywhere in contracts: "We'll adopt industry standards for security, compliance, and audit." It sounds like a solid commitment, but the truth is, the industry standard is remarkably low.
A 2023 Navex Global survey found that only half of compliance professionals rated their programs as mature. For every company doing this well, there's another barely scraping by, struggling to meet even a basic threshold of competence. And the reasons are clear. Security, compliance, and other trust functions are treated as operational cost centers in nearly every business. The result? Organizations settle for the bare minimum, defining success as "minimum viable checkbox."
When organizations over-emphasize efficiency and cost-control in trust operations, they undermine their ability to create trust, leaving gaps that weaken their capacity to deliver on promises. That approach might hold for a while, but it's fragile and unlikely to sustain stakeholder confidence in the long run.
Do you purchase from companies you almost trust?
Customers don't buy from companies they almost trust. Trust isn't an afterthought for buyers; research shows it is the third factor buyers evaluate, alongside price and quality. It shapes decisions, defines relationships, and acts as the foundation for long-term value creation. Yet too often its importance is overlooked, with organizations operating under the belief that trust is assumed and requires no intentionality unless a failure occurs.
That kind of thinking ignores the fact that trust-building is embedded in every motion, interaction, and transaction an organization executes. When organizations sell trustworthiness as part of their go-to-market, they are selling a promise about how the company operates and the values it runs by. Those contractual commitments to security, privacy, compliance, and resiliency are obligations: duties to deliver safety, resilience, and demonstrable trust. They bind the organization to a way of running its business, requiring specific investments, behaviors, and levels of operational excellence.
This doesn't mean spending indiscriminately. "Thinking in Trust" doesn't require new tools or additional spending; it requires reframing. The same systems organizations use for security and compliance are repurposed to proactively deliver evidence that promises are kept, commitments fulfilled, and stakeholders assured. These investments actively demonstrate trustworthiness as an integral part of the organization's product or service offering.
Returns on trust investments unfold across three horizons:
Short-term: Trust creates immediate go-to-market and financial value by enabling smoother pipeline velocity, better unit economics, and more deals closing faster at higher valuations.
Mid-term: Tools like TrustNPS™ and trust market studies measure internal and external trust quality, helping organizations refine trust products to stay aligned with buyer expectations and, more importantly, accurately predict the future impact of trust value.
Long-term: Trust influences entity valuation, defends against equity discounting, and reduces M&A friction at both entity and portfolio levels.
Failing to recognize that the same security, compliance, and trust which organizations view as cost centers is actually manufacturing and shipping critical market-facing deliverables (Trust), is a common but critical strategic error. These teams aren't "checkbox tickers"—they're crafting evidence-based trust stories that continuously prove the organization can and does deliver on the promises sold to customers and made to stakeholders. When their budgets are cut, their work deprioritized, or their missions diminished, companies aren't saving money: they're introducing trust friction, possibly breaking promises, and placing value creation and defense at risk.
Competitor complacency might tempt organizations to think the industry standard is enough. After all, if others are succeeding with the same baseline, why invest more? But this reasoning misses the point. Trust failures in the industry erode customer expectations and intensify scrutiny. Being proactive in delivering trust to market is how organizations build a trust moat: a durable, market-defining advantage that competitors cannot simply buy or imitate, ensuring long-term differentiation and value resilience.
Trust isn't built on minimum standards; it's built on consistent, deliberate investment in doing things right by your customers and ensuring stakeholders recognize the value of your trustworthiness. The question isn't, "How do we meet the industry standard?", it's, "How do we ensure the standard we set earns the trust we're selling?".
This article appeared originally here at Cyber Security Tribe.