How businesses can navigate trust and safety online

Due to their convenience, digital platforms are becoming a preferred channel for customers, helping them make more informed and faster purchase decisions. In addition, “sellers” get access to broader markets and the flexibility to operate from a place of their choice. However, the flip side is that organisations must maintain a balance between navigating business interests and providing the right customer experience. When harmonising these two integral and complimentary aspects, various aspects, such as trust and safety, come into play.

Trust and safety refers to the steps and practices implemented by businesses to secure their digital platforms, ensuring a secure and reliable environment for users and customers and building customer trust. 

These measures include deploying tools and strategies formulated to safeguard users from risks, such as fraud or abuse, harassment, misinformation, and other malicious activities. The advent of digitisation and companies opting to assist customers online has shifted business priorities from focusing solely on revenue growth and process optimisation to fostering customer engagement, retention, and trust. 

Navigating industry impact and threats 

Some of the major areas affected by fraud include e-commerce, social media, and digital payments. Per data businesses in e-commerce, money transfer and banking services are expected to lose more than US$200 billion to online payment fraud between 2020 and 2024. This figure is attributed to the increased sophistication of fraudulent attempts and the rising number of attack vectors within these industries.  

Today, online marketplaces are finding it more difficult to ensure the trust and safety of their customers. The sale of banned or prohibited products, or those unfit for sale (such as adulterated or toxic consumables), can expose customers to hazardous risks that can lead to serious legal and reputational implications for the affected online marketplace. In addition, fraudsters tend to intercept logistical touchpoints between the seller and buyer, to either steal or replace genuine products with counterfeit ones. Further, misrepresentation of product specifications can damage customer trust and lead to decreased traffic on the online marketplace.

Social media platforms have understood the importance of incorporating trust and safety measures to ensure a positive and inclusive environment for their users. Although social media offers a valuable platform for users to express their opinions and share content, certain risks can jeopardise overall platform safety and security. These risks include sharing malicious media, fraudulent ads, spreading misinformation, indulging in opinion polarisation, and circulating hate speeches.

The ability to easily connect with different users around the globe also has its drawbacks. Cyberbullying has become a growing concern, as users have become targets of harassment, intimidation, and abusive behaviour. Such issues could lead to adverse emotional and psychological consequences.

As major online businesses have in-built payment gateways, organisations must secure their platform security. This ensures that customers can freely and confidently transact in their ecosystem without worrying about breaches, credential misuse, or fraudulent transactions, leading to possible incidents of fraud. Building customer trust by offering a reliable and secure platform that addresses privacy concerns should therefore be one of the main business objectives. Further, implementing a proactive and robust anti-fraud framework is imperative to keep fraudsters at bay. Updated systems and good cyber hygiene can secure customer information from the misuse of possible fraudulent transactions. 

Mitigating risks to secure online landscape

Organisations should implement measures, such as user verification/authentication, content moderation, transparency, awareness and communication, and continuous fraud monitoring to provide a secure environment to their users and customers. 

Traditional identity verification measures, such as two-factor authentication (2FA) or Knowledge Base Authentication (KBA) are not completely foolproof and can be bypassed by sophisticated fraudsters. In our experience, we have found that organisations can implement a combination of government ID verification, facial and voice recognition, behavioural biometrics, and liveness detection in real time. This practice can ensure that a user’s digital identity matches their real identity.

When it comes to user generated content, companies need to delicately balance the two main aspects, i.e., ensuring safety and supporting free expression. Businesses are now deploying AI-based content moderation tools, which can contextualise comments, images, and videos in real time to detect deviant behaviour. 

Organisations are disclosing information regarding their policies, rules, and guidelines on their platforms. This information can be easily accessible and is presented in more user-friendly ways. Further, a proactive fraud monitoring platform can help identify trends and red flags beforehand, prompting organisations to implement trust and safety measures. They are now aligning their fraud monitoring tools with regulatory standards and company polices and guidelines to directly identify shortcomings and vulnerabilities and mitigate risks.

Regulators are recognising the emerging trends in technology and the importance of protecting customers and users online. Globally, a host of legislations and regulatory frameworks enable online businesses and platforms to ensure safe user touchpoints in jurisdictions as applicable.

Gaurav Mehta

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Gaurav Mehta is Senior Director, Financial Advisory, Deloitte India. Also co-authored by Preyas Sathiandran, Associate Dir, Financial Advisory, Deloitte India; and Ronak Ramachandran – Assistant Mngr, Financial Advisory, Deloitte.