Last week I took part in the Edelman Italia Thought Leadership series – a video series where Fiorella Passoni, CEO Edelman Italia, interviews the top managers of relevant corporations to further investigate the findings of this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer and shed light on what it takes to build Trust.
The Edelman Trust Barometer is an annual trust and credibility survey issued by Edelman Data & Intelligence (DxI). Now in its 22nd edition, the survey is based on the idea that trust is the ultimate currency in the relationship that selected institutions – Companies, Governments, NGOs and media – build with their stakeholders, defining an organisation’s license to operate, lead and succeed.
In the interview I explained what we are already doing and how we put our values into action and gave my perspective on the current trend in Trust in the Technology and Financial Services sectors.
I reflected on how CEOs are facing the challenge of recovering Trust. According to the Edelman Barometer, when considering a job, 60% of employees want their CEO to speak out on controversial issues they care about and 80% of the general population want CEOs to be personally visible when discussing public policy with external stakeholders or work their company has done to benefit society.
In my role as CEO of RGI, I have chosen to focus on ESG since my first day in office. This is now one of our six strategic projects for the growth of our Group and is based on three main pillars:
• Skills development: we need to be at the forefront of innovation and at the same time provide employability to both our employees and all people in society who need to find a job
• Diversity and authenticity: we want to focus on gender diversity because we operate in a sector where there are very few women. Currently, 30% of our RGI People are women, and we’re increasingly focusing on the development of women in our middle management
• Energy consumption: we intend to ensure that in our cloud platforms as well as in our coding model we use as little energy as possible across the whole value chain.
I also commented on the decline of trust in Tech (-5%), and on the opposite trend in Financial Services (+10%) in the last 10 years.
This trend is very important to us because we are the Insurtech leader in Europe. Considering both technology and financial services, I believe that when it comes to Trust, what makes the difference is how we protect clients’ data.
Financial Services are increasingly trusted because of their growing attention to client relations, thanks to major investments in client interaction and engagement as well as in the customer journey, with a very respectful approach to personal data. On the other hand, the Technology sector still remains very attractive, but some players – in particular in the B2C field – are losing ground due to a heavy exploitation of clients’ data.
The topic of Trust is a key one for my industry and for my Group. At RGI, we constantly work to build and develop a trustful relationship with our ecosystem.
