Financial services differ from other sectors through a relationship that is rarely so sharply defined: the customer who grants trust and the regulator who tests that trust are not the same party and do not always want the same thing. A bank, insurer or asset manager is accountable to a regulator that sets rules in advance, and at the same time to customers who judge afterwards whether those rules have delivered anything. Where a construction company or energy supplier mainly responds to signals from its environment, this sector operates under permanent supervision that is separate from what its constituency experiences. That makes the question of who you should talk to a double one: there is the formal line to the regulator, and there is the informal line to the customer, the intermediary and the organisation's own employee. Both lines exist alongside each other and do not automatically speak to one another.
In other sectors, the external party that weighs most heavily is often a nearby resident, a trade association or a local authority. In financial services, that is generally a regulator with a mandate that is not negotiable. That changes the character of the conversation: a regulator does not form an opinion the way a stakeholder does, but tests compliance. That is a different relationship from the one with a customer who grants or withholds trust based on experience. Whoever treats these two conversations as a single stakeholder field misses the difference between "compliant with the rules" and "trusted by the customer". Both can move independently of each other, and that is precisely where the risk for this sector lies.
Between the financial institution and the end customer there is often a third party: the adviser, the intermediary, the platform provider. This link often determines how a product or service is explained, and thereby how it is experienced. An institution that only looks at the end customer misses the picture from the intermediary, who often senses most sharply where explanation and reality diverge. That is a dynamic comparable to the installation sector, where the installer stands between manufacturer and resident and colours the picture from both sides.
The Trust Baseline from FTE TO AI asks internally how management believes the regulator, customer, intermediary and employee assess the organisation on reliability, explanation and aftercare. The same questions go, in adapted form, to an external survey among part of those stakeholders. The difference between those two pictures is the first outcome. That difference says something about how sharp the internal picture is, not about what the external party actually thinks. We measure the difference between what management thinks and what is said; we do not know what a stakeholder thinks until they say it themselves.
In a sector where trust affects the product itself, it stands out that a small commitment that is not kept — a customer who was promised a callback and never receives one, a promised review that never materialises — does more damage than an investment that gets postponed. Customers and regulators more often remember the pattern of small promises than the amount of a large expenditure. That is the reason the commitment tracker has a fixed place alongside the Trust Baseline: it keeps track of which commitments were made, to whom, and whether they were kept. In addition, a signal rhythm provides a fixed cadence with which the conversation with stakeholders returns periodically, rather than only after an incident.
The question of who you should talk to recurs differently in every sector. In the energy sector the emphasis lies on regional dependency and security of supply, in the real estate sector on the relationship between owner, tenant and municipality, and in construction on the client and the surroundings of the project. Financial services shares with those sectors the fact that the external party is not a single voice, but at least two: those who test and those who experience. What you additionally want to know from your own people is a question that comes back separately on the page what do you want to know from employees, and the question of how the surroundings of a branch or office judge an institution is addressed on what do you want to know from local residents.
The Trust Baseline does not deliver a verdict on what a regulator, customer or intermediary thinks. The instrument brings into view the difference between the internal expectation and what is returned externally, as soon as that is returned. It is not a prediction and no guarantee that trust increases after use. It is a way to record what has been said, who said it, and whether that matches what the organisation itself thought it knew.
The Trust Baseline, the commitment tracker and the signal rhythm are currently being developed. Anyone who wants to work with this can sign up for the waiting list; there is not yet a working product to deliver today, and we would rather state that honestly than offer something that does not yet exist.
Whoever has a clear picture of who to talk to and what is thought internally versus externally often runs into a follow-up question: how much of the work needed to have those conversations, document them and follow up on them actually requires human effort, and which part is repetition that can be supported. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, and thereby offers an additional picture alongside the Trust Baseline: not about what stakeholders think, but about where an organisation's time is currently going.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
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