Who Gets Credit for Trust?
Jamie's Asking the Wrong Questions About Data Ownership
Jul 14, 2025
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2 min read
Incentivized Data Hoarding
Six months ago, we started convening private conversations — with bankers, fintech execs, policymakers, and frustrated customers — to unpack one deceptively simple question:
Who gets paid for building trust in financial services?
Not for storing data. Not for moving it.
But for doing the real work: verification, relationship-building, risk-taking.
The answer? Not the people doing the work.
We keep talking about data ownership. We keep debating privacy.
But that’s not the conversation we need to be having.
Because the deeper issue isn’t who owns the data.
It’s who gets rewarded for building the trust that data represents.
Data monetization is really about how we incentivize the creation and reuse of trust.
And today, we’ve built the wrong incentive system.
Over the past few decades, we replaced relationships with data.
This was meant to make things more fair, scalable, and efficient — and in some ways, it did.
But we didn’t just change how trust was measured.
We changed how it was valued.
We didn’t build trust infrastructure.We built a trust extraction economy.
The Relationship Killer
Let’s rewind.
In the past, trust was personal. You walked into a bank. They knew you.
They took a risk on you not because of a score — but because they had context.
That didn’t scale. So we turned trust into data.
Your income, identity, repayment history, spending behavior — all became fields, files, and scores.
That’s what institutions now use to decide who gets access.
So far, understandable.
Here’s the twist:
The people who build trust — banks, lenders, originators — don’t get rewarded when someone else uses that data.
Instead, they pay to get it back.
They verify your income.
Then they pay a bureau to buy it.
Meanwhile, an aggregator sells your data downstream — not just for underwriting, but to advertise to you.
It’s not just inefficient.
It’s backwards.
The people who build trust lose. The people who move trust win.And the customer starts from zero — every time.
Re-Incentivizing Trust
This is the real conversation no one is having.
It’s not about who owns your data.
It’s about who’s paid for the trust your data represents.
Right now:
Not the bank that verified your documents.
Not the platform that maintained a relationship with you.
Not you.
It’s whoever sits in the middle and resells it.
If trust is the currency of access — and data is the proxy — then monetization is the policy.
And we’ve built the wrong one.
We’ve created a system where:
Gatekeeping is rewarded
Collaboration is penalized
And trust is treated like a secret someone else can sell, instead of a shared record everyone contributes to
We wrote a whitepaper about this (get in touch with us to request an advance copy).
Not about compliance.
Not about switching tools.
About economics.
It’s a breakdown of:
How trust is monetized today
Why current incentives reward hoarding, not helping
What it would take to redesign the market so trust becomes portable — and valuable — for everyone
This is the conversation fintech skipped.
It’s why switching never felt empowering.
It’s why banks are reluctant to share.
It’s why Plaid changed access — but didn’t change the system.
Because if you don’t fix how trust is monetized, you’ll never fix how it’s shared.
