By Rukayat Moisehme
For an economy where information moves within seconds and businesses depend increasingly on digital systems, global supply chains and complex financial networks, trust has become more than a corporate virtue.
Trust has become an important component of governance, business value and institutional resilience.
For boards, the challenge is no longer limited to ensuring that an organisation delivers revenue, profits and growth.
Every digital payment, electronic transfer, online transaction and technology-enabled service requires an underlying assumption: that the institution handling the transaction will do what it has promised.
Increasingly, directors must also ensure that their institutions can command the confidence of the people and organisations whose decisions determine their survival — investors, customers, employees, regulators, suppliers and business partners.
This is the emerging reality of what has been described as the trust economy where reputation, transparency and confidence influence commercial decisions as significantly as financial considerations.
At the centre of that economy is governance.
A company may have strong financials, sophisticated technology and ambitious growth plans, but when stakeholders lose confidence in its leadership, systems or ability to honour commitments, the consequences can quickly translate into financial, operational and reputational costs.
The President of the Chartered Institute of Directors Nigeria, Mr Adetunji Oyebanji, said in today’s increasingly interconnected and transparent business environment, financial capital alone is no longer sufficient to guarantee institutional sustainability.
He notes that organisations must also earn and preserve the confidence of their investors, customers, employees, regulators, business partners and the wider society.
“Trust influences whether investors commit capital, whether customers remain loyal, whether regulators have confidence in an institution and whether employees are proud to be associated with it.
“Ultimately, trust can determine an organisation’s ability to sustain its licence to operate.
“Reputation, therefore, can no longer be viewed simply as a communications or public relations matter. It is a governance responsibility, a strategic asset and an important component of institutional resilience,” he said.
Oyebanji says boards have a central role to play in building and protecting that trust.
For Funke Opeke, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of MainOne, trust economy became a defining part of her business experience.
She recounts her journey with MainOne, which she says provides a practical illustration of how trust can move from an abstract corporate value to a tangible business asset.
According to Opeke, when FirstBank decided to outsource its data centre colocation services to MainOne, the decision meant entrusting a critical component of its operations to an external company.
“The significance went beyond the financial value of the contract as the bank was effectively trusting MainOne to maintain infrastructure on which its transactions depended, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
“The decision was not simply about cost savings, rather, it reflected the confidence the bank had developed in MainOne’s ability to deliver.
“The decision was made based on trust in the counterparty,” she said.
That confidence, however, did not emerge from reputation alone.
Opeke explains that MainOne deliberately built governance, sustainability, transparency, accountability and resilience into its operations.
For her, the lesson was clear: trust must be supported by systems capable of delivering on the promises that created it.
“By placing my reputation on the line, my team understood the need to build systems and processes and a culture that delivered on the trust that customers were placing in us,” she said.
Opeke adds that trust cannot be created merely through public statements, corporate communications or the personal reputation of a chief executive.
She says it was built through consistent decisions, ethical conduct, transparency, effective oversight, risk management and the organisation’s response when things go wrong.
Governance expert, Mr Tijjani Borodo, describes trust as one of the most valuable strategic assets an organisation can hold.
He, however, warns that while it may take decades to build, it can be lost through a single ethical failure, poor judgement or governance lapse.
According to him, the increasing speed at which information moves has made that risk even more pronounced.
“Investors, regulators, employees, customers and the public can scrutinise corporate decisions almost immediately, meaning that a governance failure in one part of an organisation can quickly become a reputational crisis affecting the entire institution,” he said.
For boards, therefore, reputation management is no longer something that can be delegated entirely to communications or public relations teams.
It begins in the boardroom.
Directors must ask themselves questions beyond whether a decision is commercially sound: Is it ethical? Is it responsible? Is it transparent? Can it be defended to stakeholders? And will it strengthen or diminish confidence in the institution?
These questions are becoming more important as boards navigate technological disruption, cybersecurity threats, artificial intelligence, sustainability concerns, regulatory complexity and increasingly interconnected global markets.
For the modern board, the question is increasingly not only how much value an organisation creates, but whether stakeholders trust it enough to continue creating that value.
That is the essence of the trust economy.(NAN)
Edited by Folasade Adeniran
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