Fraud, friction, and the future: Prioritising trust in a high-stakes market

In 2024, a major Australian financial services institution came under intense scrutiny for failing to act on nearly 1000 customer reports of unauthorised transactions between January 2020 and August 2024, resulting in customer losses totaling A$23 million. Almost $16 million of this occurred in the six months from October 2023 to March 2024. Regulators didn't mince words, calling the issue "widespread and systemic", which was further confirmed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's report that Australians lost over $2 billion to scams in 2024.  

Because of rising regulatory scrutiny, growing public vigilance regarding digital threats, and fast-evolving technologies, finding ways to establish consumer trust has become a key topic in Australia's boardrooms. Just as the majority of consumers say they lose trust in brands that mishandle their personal data, the opposite is also true: when a brand gains and maintains their trust, it correlates to increased customer loyalty and contributes to a strong brand reputation, which in turn drives revenue growth. 

According to our 2025 Safety in numbers report that outlines trust and safety investment trends, Australian business leaders are "walking the talk", with 52% saying they intend to significantly increase their investment in fraud detection over the next 12 months. Notably, this was the highest percentage among the APAC markets surveyed. 

A new era of corporate accountability 

Initiatives such as Australia's Scam Prevention Framework signal a clear shift: companies will be required by law to protect the customers and data they steward. With enforceable obligations, steep penalties, and regulatory oversight, the framework raises the bar for accountability. 

In order to comply, companies must build trust into the entire customer lifecycle and across the organisation. In the digital era, fraud prevention has outgrown the back office. It's now a board-level priority and the majority of business units must play a role in shaping, delivering and communicating trust strategies. 

Building trust is a team sport

This is why forward-thinking businesses are removing internal silos to ensure that trust and safety isn't owned by any one team. In addition to cybersecurity experts, compliance officers and risk analysts, CX, marketing and product functions are playing critical roles in keeping customers safe. 

When every department is committed to security and safety, an organisation is better equipped to establish trust with its customers at every touchpoint. For example, CX leaders can track the impact of smoother authentication and secure self-service tools on customer satisfaction, marketing teams can ensure transparency in how its data policies are presented on its channels, and product teams can iterate on security products and services to incorporate customer feedback. 

As we've seen firsthand with our clients, integrated governance and process design across teams helps build more robust systems that are secure without being too rigid or cumbersome with tedious security checks, like repeated identity verification or multi-step logins that could negatively impact customer satisfaction.

The rise of hybrid trust models

In highly regulated sectors like banking and financial services, the stakes are too high to rely solely on automation or other technologies to protect customer and company interests. Instead, hybrid models that fuse technology's speed and accuracy with humans' nuanced and ethical oversight are seen as the best way to maintain secure operations while preserving the customer experience. 

For instance, technology like biometric verification, which uses machine learning algorithms to analyse and compare a person's facial features, fingerprints or voice, to confirm their identity is made better when paired with humans reviewing edge cases and reducing bias that may be present in the technology. Enterprises adopting a hybrid approach are also committed to regularly upskilling their CX agents on how to leverage new technologies to best protect customers. 

As generative AI accelerates and amplifies more sophisticated threats like deepfakes and automated phishing, the need for a seamless integration of humans and technology has never been greater. Hybrid models give businesses the agility to detect better, respond quickly, escalate appropriately, and resolve issues in ways that establish and reinforce customer trust. In practice, combining real-time fraud detection with KYC and expert human oversight has produced accuracy rates above 90%, like in the case of a global digital marketplace that has sustained this high level for over a decade.

Designing trust for tomorrow

In Australia's fast-moving digital economy, trust has become a tangible driver of business growth, with data showing the correlation of digital trust and national GDP. The organisations pulling ahead treat trust as a catalyst, something that keeps pace with shifting customer expectations, new regulations, and emerging technologies. This shift reflects a reframing of the perception of digital safety from a compliance burden to an essential investment for the sustainable growth of today's companies.

Building trust into the customer experience starts with intentionality. It's about implementing  protections at every touchpoint, creating systems that work across teams, and offering transparency every step of the way. Most of all, it's about offering your customers peace of mind – assuring them that their data and identity are protected today and well into the future.