How C-Suite Leaders Can Bridge The Digital Economy Trust Gap

Trust In The Age of Instant

When Robinhood, a platform built on the promise of democratizing finance, halted the purchase of GameStop stock during a trading frenzy, it wasn’t just a disruption; it was a betrayal. The platform many trusted to empower everyday investors appeared to side with institutional players, shattering confidence and igniting backlash.

Since then, I’ve advised and interviewed dozens of AI and tech CxOs, including top fintech CEOs from Brex, Highbeam, Affirm, RecargaPay, and Remitly on The Reboot Chronicles Show. One thread in all of those conversations has been trust.

From the world’s biggest companies like Walmart and United Airlines to emerging growth brands, C-suite leaders are developing partnerships with these fintech companies, while navigating uncertainties of the digital-first economy—and one lesson is clear. Trust is not a luxury. It is the foundation of everything: from innovation and partnership deals to consumer relationships and transactions.

Sound simple? It’s not—especially when you are talking about people’s money.

That’s the ethos embraced by digital payments companies who are rebooting the financial services trust gap in global payments. From behemoths like Western Union and MoneyGram to emerging growth companies like PayPal/Xoom, Wise, Remitly and dozens more—there is no shortage of aggressive competition in this sector.

When you look behind the scenes of this active disruption crime scene, there are broader go-to-market and consumer insights that C-suite leaders can learn from.

Financial Services Pain Point And Trust Gap

While ordering next-day delivery or hailing a ride with a tap on a screen might feel effortless, the same can’t always be said for sending money across borders—a process that impacts millions of lives but remains fraught with unseen complexity and cyber threats. Delays, opaque fees, poor communication and high barriers to access can all erode trust in cross-border payments.

For an industry handling over $1.8 trillion annually, these pain points represent both a challenge and an opportunity. I know people who rely on these services. One, lets call her Maria, lives in New York and sends money weekly to her parents in Guatemala. These funds cover essentials that can’t wait like food, medical care, and utilities. Traditionally, Maria would visit a local MoneyGram or Western Union location during business hours, complete a lengthy process, and maybe pay hefty fees. Even small delays could mean her family doesn’t receive funds in time to pay urgent bills.

Maria’s experience is not unique. Research shows that over 85% of funds sent via remittances go toward non-discretionary expenses such as housing, healthcare, and education.

Disruptors’ Approach: Fix The Friction

Cross-border payments are a vital lifeline for millions globally, yet moments of friction can quickly erode customer trust. Emerging providers have tackled these challenges head-on by focusing on speed, cost and accessibility.

When I sat down with Remitly (RELY) CEO, Matt Oppenheimer, I learned over 90% of the company’s transfers are completed within an hour with a take rate of less than 3%–saving customers $800 million in fees last year. Operating in 170 countries with billions of bank accounts and mobile wallets, and thousands of cash pickup options, its global payment network seems convenient and accessible. Yet, my takeaway from our discussions is that they’re just getting started.

“Every customer expects a fast, affordable transfer,” says Matt Oppenheimer, CEO of Remitly. “And trust is built when we deliver peace of mind in the moments that matter most. This philosophy drives our relentless effort to reduce friction across the customer journey, leveraging AI and advanced systems to address problems that many overlook – beginning with access.”

Western Union (WU), where I used to work, has been rebooting itself—and working on disrupting the disruptive disruptors. President and CEO Devin McGranahan has been on mission to “find and fix the friction,” and seems to be making progress on his Evolve 2025 plan. He is focused on stabilizing their declining retail business and accelerating digital services through organic growth, partnerships, and probably acquisitions.

WU is a big ship to turnaround at scale. With a global network of 600,000 agents in over 200 countries and territories, which send $100 billion between 120 million senders and receivers per year—they need to keep doubling down on digital services.

McGranahan addressed WU’s digital progress and how he is improving experiences by reducing friction and transaction times, stating on a recent earnings call, “In addition to driving traffic at the top of the funnel, we’ve also made meaningful progress in simplifying the customer journey and improving our funnel conversion rates. As part of that process, we have simplified the branded digital customer profile creation. We have reduced the steps required for a customer to complete a transaction and have modernized our user interface and moved from a multipage transaction funnel to a single page modular view.”

Expanding Digital Financial Access For Underserved

Each year, millions of people living and working abroad encounter significant hurdles to accessing financial services. Many traditional banks rely on outdated risk models that evaluate customers using documentation that a globally mobile worker may not have, like a local home address, bank account, credit history or social security number.

They may also avoid serving high-risk markets or transaction corridors due to the intricacies of regulatory compliance and potential for financial crime.

Companies like Remitly are charting a different course, leveraging robust regulatory partnerships and pioneering a risk and compliance framework explicitly designed for the needs of globally mobile workers. This forward-thinking approach makes it possible to serve customers in traditionally underserved regions. It ensures that families across the globe who rely on remittances receive secure and timely financial support—no matter where they are.

Transforming Treasury Management with AI

One of the biggest surfaces for friction is behind the scenes of the money movement process itself. Global money markets are anything but predictable. In the time it takes for funds to travel from Canada to India, exchange rates can shift, significantly impacting the value of transfers sent to loved ones abroad.

Instead of waiting for funds to move through the global financial network—which introduces customer risk and delay—Remitly’s global treasury system anticipates demand and pre-stocks currencies in recipient countries. By ensuring funds are ready when customers need them, the company prevents many of the challenges that traditionally slow transfers.

Central to this strategy is the use of AI-powered forecasting. Leveraging real-time data on seasonality, historical trends, and market movements, Remitly’s advanced models predict currency demand with remarkable accuracy. Updated hourly, these forecasts enable the company to pre-purchase currencies at optimal rates, generating both time and cost savings that I assume they can pass on to customers.

As Oppenheimer notes, “The biggest challenges to cross-border payments are our competitive advantages.” For businesses operating in unpredictable markets, our strategy demonstrates how AI can transform volatility into reliability to improve speed and drive down costs for customers.”

Tackling Fraud Without Slowing Transactions

As transaction speed increases, so can risk. In 2023, consumers reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud—a staggering 14% increase from the previous year, according to the FTC. This alarming trend presents a challenge for financial service providers: how to safeguard customers from ever-more sophisticated fraudsters while maintaining the speed and convenience modern consumers expect.

It’s crucial to strike a balance between security and efficiency as traditional fraud prevention methods, involving lengthy verification processes or overly cautious transaction flagging, can frustrate users and erode trust.

Just as fraudsters have used AI and machine learning to increase the velocity and scale of attacks over the past several years, companies have doubled down on the same technology to detect and respond to threats in real-time.

By leveraging ML-driven models capable of analyzing thousands of transactions per hour, Remitly identifies nuanced patterns and anomalies in real-time.

Unlike traditional rules-based systems, these models are highly adaptive and precise. With each interaction, the system improves its ability to distinguish genuine threats from everyday activity. This approach may be paying off. Last year, the company was able to reduce both fraud interventions and losses as fraudsters adopted increasingly complex tactics. The results point to what all CxOs want—stronger fraud protection and faster, more seamless customer experiences.

For financial leaders hesitant to integrate AI and machine learning into their fraud prevention protocols, it’s a stark reminder that avoiding these technologies may pose a greater risk. Fraudsters today can launch dozens of attacks simultaneously, a scale unimaginable just a few years ago. These strategies, from financial services providers, seem to offer an encouraging blueprint to effectively counter this surge in online scams and fraud, using the same technology to protect customers without slowing them down.

Overcoming The Valley of Doubt

By the time a customer reaches out to support, they’re already navigating what Oppenheimer calls, “The Valley of Doubt” – moments of anxiety that can define a customer’s relationship with a company or service. Do you recall how you felt with your very first Lyft or Uber ride? I do. It’s worse than that feeling of doubt.

“Trust isn’t built solely in moments of perfection; it’s earned in moments of uncertainty,” says Oppenheimer. “Remitlians see every challenge as an opportunity to prove that we’re worthy of the trust our customers place in us.”

Like other companies across sectors, they deployed an AI chatbot to address common money transfer issues—and report that the bot can resolve routine inquiries four times faster than a human representative, while maintaining similar satisfaction ratings. With AI solutions, CxOs in the broader financial services sector are learning that in more complex or sensitive interactions, customers need access to human agents, ensuring that personalized attention is available when it’s needed most.

For CxOs looking to deploy that type of agile AI CX, there are plenty of vendors that can help.

Innovation And Trust Lessons

The Age of Instant isn’t over. Meeting the expectations of today’s customers requires more than operational upgrades—it demands a strategic commitment to innovation and trust-building. Fintechs provide some good lessons for C-suite leaders, underscoring the importance of aligning technology with real customer needs, ensuring that solutions don’t just deliver speed but also foster reliability, security, and accessibility at every touchpoint:

Elevate Customer-Centric Design: Products and services must be built around the realities of global customers, addressing their unique barriers and expectations.

Deploy AI with Strategic Intent: Innovation must be led by the problem it’s solving in order to simplify, protect, and enhance the customer journey—not add layers of complexity.

Combine Scalability with Precision: Whether it’s customer onboarding, fraud detection, or support, systems should operate efficiently without losing the personal connection that drives trust.

In a world where customer loyalty is built transaction by transaction, the ability to innovate thoughtfully will define the next generation of leaders. Company leaders that understand this shift—and act with clarity and purpose—are poised to shape not just their industry sector but the future of customer experiences itself. Let’s seize that.