Welcome to the World of Trust Assurance

Sravish Sridhar

21 Mar 2022

Trust assurance helps grow revenue

Do you believe that trust is the foundation of every business relationship? I do. If I don’t trust you, I’ll never work with you, and vice versa. If a business loses trust in another business, the business relationship will end.

I am passionate about the fact that if you make a commitment to do something, you must do it, and prove that you are doing it. If you’re not able to do it, be transparent and let the other party know that you’ve not done it. Show them that you have a plan to adhere to the commitment, and provide them with proof when you achieve compliance. This simple cyclical behavioral pattern helps you earn trust.

So, how can we live in a world where trust in business is continuously measured? I started TrustCloud with this simple idea.

Why Trust Assurance?

To establish our credibility as trustworthy companies, we enter into trust obligations across many facets of our business. From complying with customer contracts and commitments to adhering to employment, tax, and privacy laws, to reporting progress to our investors and teams, trust is at the heart of countless compliance workflows.

We dedicate enormous effort — money, time, and resources — to adopting compliance standards in pursuit of this goal. However, the world of compliance is opaque and nebulous, and requires you to hire expensive experts to guide you through an endless list of manual tasks involving spreadsheets, screenshots, and documents.

Is this effort well-spent? At the end of the day, are we sure that we are truly compliant? Will we still be compliant in six months? The reality is that most companies take on the risk of not knowing whether they are entirely compliant, simply because strict adherence to every guideline and regulation is extremely difficult, expensive and time consuming.

Do we want to take on this risk? No!
Do we want to rest easy knowing that we are compliant? Yes!
How can we make it effortless for all of us to solve for both?

Where is our system of record for trust?

Why GRC isn’t good enough to earn Trust

When we speak to teams that have had experience with using legacy GRC tools, we find that they hate the drudgery of doing all the work manually with these tools. They are either frustrated with mind-numbing task-list spreadsheets and manual evidence collection, or fed up with the fact that they spend all this time and money to ‘check-the-box’ while truthfully meeting their compliance obligations.

Customers tell us that they hate that GRC is:

  • A check-the-box chore: The irony is that after everything is done, a company is not 100% confident that they are truly compliant
  • Not easy to understand: Individuals don’t know why they are doing something
  • Static and manual: Lots of spreadsheets and documents
  • Expensive: Requires special skills to use (and a boatload of cash)

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What is Trust Assurance?

Trust Assurance is a brand new approach. Trust Assurance is a crafted, consumer-grade user experience that demystifies compliance. It pairs machine learning with intuitive design to do most of the work for you; embedding accurate testability into every workflow to reduce your risk and ensure truth in compliance. Trust Assurance enables teams of all maturity and experience levels to understand, generate, measure and manage compliance programs with confidence and ease.

With Trust Assurance, trust becomes:

  • A daily habit: Every individual understands how their actions map to business-wide compliance, sales and contractual commitments
  • Continuously measured and automated, via APIs and AI
  • Transparent and truthful
  • Democratized and affordable for everyone

Trust creates a cultural shift in an organization in which everyone takes on the onus of responsibility for the company’s security and success.

It’s never about doing the bare minimum to get a compliance certification. It’s about going above and beyond to achieve the highest possible standards of security, to ensure that customer data is safe and sound in your possession.

This trust-based approach is available to every business. It is not only demystified; but counterintuitively, also easier and faster to achieve as well. It can also mean shorter sales cycles. This is the inevitable future, and this is why we’re focused on building it.

The oceans of destiny are flowing away from compliance island — towards the uncharted, transparently blue waters of trust island. Trust Assurance gives you the map and rowboat to get there first.

Welcome to Trust Assurance. You’ve got yourself some paddles now. It’s time to jump on board.