Chief Trust Officer: the essential new C-Suite executive

Until recently, trust was seen as a soft outcome of doing good business, not a central pillar of it. That era is over. Customers, regulators, employees, and investors now expect trust to be a defined C-suite responsibility. As cyber-threats escalate, data regulations multiply, and AI outpaces most governance models, it has become clear that organisations need a single leader to bring security, privacy, legal, compliance, and communications together to build trust.

 

A Commvault study of UK business leaders found that 97% say it’s time to add a Chief Trust Officer (CTrO) to the C-suite. Respondents pointed to three main forces driving this shift:

• The rise of AI (37%)
• Tightening cross-border data regulations (34%)
• Persistent cyber-threats such as ransomware (34%) 

Together, these developments are turning trust from a communications value into a legal, compliance, and resilience imperative. As generative AI spreads, data ethics and governance have become central to corporate credibility; organisations must know exactly who accesses data, how it’s used, and for what purpose.

 

Trust, or the lack thereof, also has a direct impact on corporate performance. Cyber-security and data-protection incidents that were once seen as IT issues are now board-level crises affecting reputation, investors, and careers. Regulators and investors increasingly expect transparency and accountability after a breach. In this climate, judgments around honesty, clarity, and the ability to recover quickly now define whether a company is trusted.

 

The CTrO role

The challenge is not that organisations dismiss the value of trust; it’s that trust is rarely operationalised. Too often, trust is treated as a byproduct of other functions – security, compliance, legal, or communications – rather than a defined responsibility.

 

As a result, “ownership” of trust is fragmented. Few organisations have a single, end-to-end view of how corporate decision-making, leadership behaviour, customer care, and crisis response combine to influence trust. The CTrO role is emerging as the integrator that unifies these issues and becomes accountable for how stakeholders judge an organisation’s trustworthiness.

 

According to the study, leaders see a CTrO’s top priorities as:

• Customer trust and reputation management (31%)
• Rapid crisis response to issues such as disinformation or data breaches (30%) 

To deliver on this, successful CTrOs need a broad mix of capabilities, including:

• Deep understanding of data-privacy and regulatory frameworks
• Knowledge of AI governance and digital risk
• The ability to translate complex technologies for diverse audiences
• The skills to build and sustain stakeholder trust over time 

In practice, the CTrO works closely with the CISO, General Counsel, and other leaders to align on transparency and accountability before crises occur, and to ensure that actions and communications stay in lockstep when they do. They help translate technical risk into language boards, regulators, and customers can act on.

 

This reflects a wider reality: resilience now depends as much on credibility as on capability. A secure-by-design environment alone does not guarantee confidence; how an organisation handles and explains incidents matters just as much. The CTrO embodies that shift, turning trust into a strategic function that is measurable, accountable, and tied directly to business resilience.

 

Trust: what comes next

We are still in the early days. Only 7% of UK respondents said their organisation has one leader accountable for digital trust; in most companies, responsibility is still scattered across roles such as the CISO, CIO, and COO. Yet as AI adoption accelerates, regulations tighten, and high-profile breaches continue, stakeholders will expect clearer accountability.

 

Trust is earned through transparency, not perfection. It remains hard won and easily lost, especially when reputations can deteriorate quickly if situations are handled poorly. By centralising digital-trust oversight in a single executive and ending siloed responsibilities across the boardroom, organisations can streamline decision-making and make trust a key pillar of the enterprise rather than a slogan.

 

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Mark Molyneux is Field CTO, North Europe at Commvault

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Yevhen Lahunov