Few would disagree that we live in an increasingly instant world today. Payments move in seconds. Customers can onboard in minutes. AI can generate answers instantly. Businesses can operate faster than ever before.
Yet, trust, one of the foundations of business, remains remarkably old-fashioned and still takes time to build. And that’s where many organizations get tripped up.
In banking, speed remains essential as clients increasingly expect immediacy. But alongside the expectations comes another set of questions: How do I prevent fraud? How do I know whom I’m transacting with? How do I trust information generated in seconds? How do I build confidence with customers and partners I’ve never met?
The technology behind modern payments has evolved rapidly, but the human factors surrounding those payments have not. In other words, transactions have become instant. Trust still moves at a human pace.
What I see in payments is increasingly true across industries. Technology is making it easier to transact, communicate, and make decisions at unprecedented speed, but trust still develops the way it always has. This by no means is a criticism of technology. It’s a reminder that technology and trust solve different problems.
Technology versus trust
Technology compresses transaction cycles, and trust reduces uncertainty. One makes things happen faster. The other makes people comfortable moving forward.
As more aspects of business become instantaneous, leaders need to invest in both. The challenge isn’t choosing between speed and trust. It’s delivering both.
In today’s instant world, trust can and must be designed as intentionally as speed. I think of this as “programmable trust,” or confidence built into systems, processes, and accountability. Embed customer confidence into the fabric of our business operations.
4 ways leaders can put programmable trust into practice
Countless leading brands exemplify how trust can be built into the way organizations operate. The most resilient companies go beyond good intentions and create confidence through systems, processes and decision-making. Here are a few critical steps to build programmable trust.
1. Believe the risks of speed
Every improvement in speed changes the risk equation. Speed creates value—but it also introduces new vulnerabilities. Real-time payments leave less time to detect fraud. Automated onboarding leaves less time to identify bad actors.
Before accelerating any process, leaders should ask a simple question: What assumptions become more important when we remove time from the equation?
At Piermont, we made a deliberate decision several years ago not to rush into deploying AI chatbots on our website. While the technology could have delivered instant responses, we believed the potential cost of customer frustration outweighed the benefit of speed.
Subsequent consumer research confirmed we were right to wait, revealing widespread frustration with chatbot interactions. More than three-quarters of consumers became “detractors” after the experience.
As of today, chatbots still fail to deliver the level of customer experience the technology aspires to. And Piermont still operates chatbot-free, simply because we realize it does not fit our business-to-business service model.
Instead, we invested in improving human response time while giving the technology more time to mature. We leverage AI’s data analysis power to equip our customer care teams with more insight to prioritize fraud detection, real-time monitoring and client communications.
The lesson was simple: Speed creates value only when leaders understand the risks that come with it. Speed is most effective when leaders understand what it improves and what it changes.
2. Program trust into your operations
Trust scales best when it is built into a process rather than dependent on a person.
Consider Amazon. Customers buy with confidence because trust has been built into the experience through reliable delivery, transparent returns, and clear communication. That’s programmable trust in action.
In industries like banking, however, trust often extends beyond the product itself. Clients expect reliable delivery alongside access to expertise when important decisions need to be made. The strongest organizations combine repeatable systems with knowledgeable professionals who can provide guidance, judgment, and accountability when it matters most.
3. Separate speed from decision quality
One of the biggest misconceptions of the instant era is that speed and quality naturally move together. Well, they don’t. Technology can accelerate analysis. It cannot replace judgment.
Among the small and medium-sized businesses we serve, their operational models are very diverse, and every business’s workflow is different from another’s. Whether it’s payment automation or creditworthiness review, technology helps a lot, but human quality control is always behind the scenes. Sometimes that means adding more hands to meet the technology-enabled faster transactional speed.
Leaders should identify which decisions can be automated, which can be accelerated, and which still deserve deliberate review. A payment can settle instantly, but that doesn’t eliminate the need to verify the payment’s recipient. AI can generate recommendations in seconds, but leaders remain responsible for evaluating the outcome.
In many cases, the most valuable decisions are the ones made with the right balance of speed, context, and judgment.
4. Measure confidence along with efficiency
Businesses have become exceptionally good at measuring efficiency. We track response times, processing times, delivery times, and cycle times with remarkable precision. These metrics matter because customers, partners and employees increasingly expect speed.
But organizations that sustain growth over time also pay outsized attention to confidence. In an increasingly instant world, confidence may be one of the most valuable metrics leaders can track.
I measure confidence by looking at new accounts alongside a laser focus on retained clients. We examine deals and how well bankers know their customers. It’s a bundled review.
Data and processes are one part of the story, and KYC (know your customer) standards for banking complete the puzzle. When we connect the people with the automated processes, we have more confidence in our deal decisions.
In short, the organizations that thrive in the instant era will be the ones that move quickly while creating confidence at every step of the journey. Because while transactions may happen instantly, trust still takes time.