Managing the Trust Relationship in Financial Services Information Systems

Scholars in many disciplines have examined the importance of and the process of building various forms of trust. This paper studies the trust relationship in Financial Services Information Systems (FSIS), where trust plays an important role as it has a positive effect on customer satisfaction and leads to a higher level of customer loyalty. Certain system properties of FSIS create unique challenges for building trust relationship with the customers. To tackle these challenges, we propose a trust topology that consists of reputation, experience and communication to describe the dynamics of the trust relationship. Specifically, the trust relationship is first established based on the reputation of the associated and constituent agents of the FSIS, and is subsequently validated against the customers' actual experience of the system. As with any dynamic variable, the quality and level of this relationship is subject to change and must be continuously rehabilitated through communication.