Deloitte brings its ’Enterprise Trust’ Service to India

Deloitte, a global professional services firm, is bringing its ‘Enterprise Trust’ service to the Indian market. Plans are afoot to roll this service from January-February next year, a top official said.

“We have developed a framework to measure Enterprise Trust across various domains and drivers in a business, including a comparison of an enterprise’s measure with industry benchmarks.

This will enable Boards and CXOs (in India) to identify areas of trust deficit, prioritize actions, and initiate remedial measures”, Sriraman Parthasarathy, Partner, Enterprise Trust, Deloitte India told BusinessLine.

Trust Index
Put simply, ‘Enterprise Trust’ involves showing the trust mirror on enterprises. As more and more companies realise the value of trust, they are waking up to it. The Trust Index or score developed by this service is a measure at a point in time and will not be an opinion.

Parthasarathy said that the combination of volatile times, increasing trust deficit between markets and society, and the implications of breach of trust on customers, employees, investors, and other shareholders necessitate active monitoring and management of Enterprise Trust by Boards and CXOs through the use of performance measures and other qualitative factors.

In India, Deloitte has set up a separate group to look at ‘Enterprise Trust’. It is now in the process of surveying 1000 odd companies — listed, unlisted and Startups —to build the relevant industry benchmark. The ‘Enterprise Trust’ service went live in the US a couple of years back.

This Deloitte move to introduce this service in India comes at a time when trust of stakeholders in an enterprise is becoming critical for sustainable business and a key competitive differentiator. Increasingly, ‘trust’ of stakeholders has emerged as a Board level conversation in India.

“We firmly believe that trust is what sustains any business over the longer term and helps communicate, capture, and realize the economic benefits”, Parthasarathy said.

Tangible metric
Trust worthiness is seen as real tangible metric for market cap, customer royalty, employee retention, regulatory perception. Globally companies are now realising that impact of trust on market capitalisation are real and there are studies to show that Companies that are perceived to be highly trusted over a period of time have market capitalisation premium.

To roll out this ‘Enterprise Trust’ service, Deloitte is bringing its TrustIQ platform in India with some tweaks. The algorithm of this platform will help measure trust both at the organisation level and each of the 90 identified drivers. There will also be a separate platform to address the requirements of smaller businesses in India.

India is first country where Deloitte is launching dedicated platform for smaller companies.

The original article was published in The Hindu businessline on 29 October 2023.