Trust in the financial services industry across the globe has risen to 51 percent this year, up from 46 percent in 2012, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Yet, while this uptick is the largest increase of all the sectors surveyed and shows that financial institutions are on the road to rebuilding consumer confidence, the financial services industry remains the least trusted of the lot.

Trust me, I’m a banker
This is unsurprising given the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), an independent UK Government department, on-going investigations into the rigging of Libor, the London Interbank Offered Rate, an interest rate benchmark used for everything from pricing interest-rate swaps in the derivatives market to calculating the interest rate on your mortgage.

Since the scandal broke in 2012, the UK SFO has claimed five scalps, proving conclusively that the big banks are not too big to jail and keeping the industry’s misdeeds in the spotlight for four years – less than ideal after the financial crisis left the reputation of the entire sector in tatters.

So how can financial institutions prevent another scandal and keep building trust?

Trust but verify
Trust is hard won, and even harder to regain, but those businesses that actively seek to rebuild their customer relationships will distinguish themselves.

While 59 percent of those surveyed in the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer said that it is the role of governments to regulate, 80 percent believed that it was the responsibility of individual companies to solve the financial services industry’s problems.

Communications recording and monitoring platforms, like Smarsh, allow you to lead the way.

Smarsh’s cloud-based platform enables you to capture, archive and analyze your conversations across multiple channels, ensuring compliance with local and global regulatory regimes.

Having the ability to monitor communications in real time, accurately reconstruct transactions and securely share this data not only wards off the sort of sharp practice that precipitated the Libor scandal, but also would help mitigate the fallout from any future crisis. What’s more, monitoring and storing your communications in this way demonstrates to your customers your commitment to transparency, accountability and ethical business practice.

The financial services industry still has a long way to go to win back the trust of its customers, but Smarsh gets you one step closer.