Leading Through Vulnerability and Purpose with Larry Banda

Yeah, it's really interesting because the word trust has come up a lot recently with the business I am the executive chair of, which is a company you may not have heard of, but you will.

It's called Select ID.

It's just been given a lot of money by banks to build a digital identity marketplace in the UK.

for consumers to be able to have an ID that they can then use in multiple locations rather than having to keep on giving people they want to do business with the passport, the driving license, the utility bills, and then do that all over again when they apply for a new product or service or what have you.

The word trust has come up in that business a lot because if consumers don't trust what you're building, they're not going to use it.

And digital ID had a little bit of a bad press because of some of the work that was being done in government up until relatively recently to push digital IDs for... applying for work, having a right to stay, all those things which people saw as being a bit big brotherish, to be honest.

So I think three million people signed a petition that they didn't want a government digital ID.

So we're working on the fact that not that you should have one or have to have one, but why you should want one.

So for that, you've got to build trust, which is breaking the barriers to trust and unpicking the bad news and making sure that consumers see that they're in control of it and they are the ones that will decide to share.

their date of birth, their address, their passport details, their driving license, whatever it is that's in their basket of things that make up themselves as an identifiable person.

But to sell to them the opportunity and advantages that brings when you're applying for mortgages and loans and credit cards and all of that stuff that people need, but which is tortuous.

So we're working a lot on how we can communicate well to build trust.

trust because without that it doesn't matter how good and sexy the app is on your phone consumers aren't going to use it so trust um it runs alongside a lot of the work that's done in businesses on brand uh the business i did used to work for for a very long time nation one to 34 years um was always up there as the number one trusted brand in financial services.

Pretty big thing that.

Why was it trusted? Because it was consumer centric.

It was focused on its members.

It wasn't focused on shareholders.

It had a very good consumer story.

Now, businesses that are PLCs and have shareholders can still build trust, but they have to have their consumer story being really effectively told.

And a lot of the work I'm doing now with Select ID is there to help build trust in the UK for why people should want to have digital IDs to reduce fraud, protect themselves, as well as making it easier for them to do business and share their information and be in control of that.

So, yeah, trust is really, really important in the digital space because you can build really interesting tools for consumers to use.

It doesn't mean they're going to use them if they don't trust either the brand or the purpose with which that product app or device is being built.

So trust is just as relevant now as it was many, many moons ago when you trusted your bank manager because you could go and knock on his door and go and sit in an office and talk to him about borrowing a mortgage or buying or getting a loan for your business.

So digital businesses need to worry as much about building trust as any of those face-to-face businesses ever have.

And that comes from just the classic stuff.