This week I spoke with Elena Kvochko, chief trust officer at enterprise software giant SAP. In April 2020, Kvochko became SAP’s first chief trust officer, and she leads a team of regulatory advisors, software architects, and content experts spread across 40 countries.
Kvochko says she’s seen a lot of leaders and companies placing “trust” as a key tenet among their values but still struggling to implement and deliver on that goal. If that sounds like you, then hopefully this interview will provide some valuable insight.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Fortune: What is the role of the chief trust officer?
The scope of the chief trust officer is focusing on four pillars of privacy, compliance, security, and transparency, and we’re building a one-stop shop for our global customers based around those pillars. We added the transparency angle to really emphasize the need to stay open, transparent, and maintain constant communication with customers.
How do you build trust with customers?
Internally, we incorporate trust as part of our services. So, within the security pillar, for instance, what we do is implement controls and monitor controls, we embed security at every stage, we automate activities; within the privacy pillar, we make sure that personal information is handled appropriately, we educate our employees on best practices, and we also open up our education platforms to external stakeholders when possible, to show how we protect their data.
Externally, for clients, we also build trust through a content delivery mechanism. So there are compliance reports that need to be delivered, there are questionnaires that need to be asked of a vendor, and those are the types of services that we deliver through papers, self-service videos, and other means that help customers better serve their business needs and safeguard their own information.
What is the most challenging task in your role?
I think, for me, it’s balancing the needs between security, privacy, and that customer experience will always be an evolving challenge. Demand for issues around trust is only going to grow, and we will aim to drive leadership in the space by setting responsible policies and frameworks with our customers, to deliver on those expectations.
But I think for organizations that are just starting out on the journey, the biggest challenge could be defining the scope of "trust" as a factor of business. Because trust is everything. It’s that invisible thread that underpins every aspect of the business. So just defining "trust" in a way that's going to be core to their own business, their own technology, or their own people and strategy—that's going to be probably the biggest challenge.
Should other companies have a chief trust officer?
I think every company is unique and they should be defining for themselves where and how they deliver trust to build the services and products that most correspond to their core mission. We know that for us, as a software business and as a cloud company, cybersecurity and privacy are at our core. But depending on the business and the industry that the company is operating, they can focus and measure other domains.
But I do believe that the demand for issues around trust will continue to grow in the marketplace so it’s very much my personal hope that more companies will embrace it and establish a trust officer equivalent. I really think that we all benefit from it. And we definitely encourage other businesses that specifically depend on technology for their processes and their daily operations, to prioritize this new business category and find a way to deliver it as a service.
Next week, Trust Factor will have insights from Takeda Pharmaceuticals' chief digital trust officer, Mike Towers, on how the pharma industry is playing catch-up when it comes to digitization.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
