
Why Your Actions Are The Only Things You Truly Own
When prospective clients, partners, or leaders first meet you, they won’t give you the benefit of the doubt right off the bat. Instead, the starting point is uncertainty and skepticism about whether you are someone that is credible and that they can trust. Author Michael Maslansky calls this the post-trust era.
This post-trust era can be clearly seen with the rapid growth of the sharing economy. “The Sharing Economy relies on the willingness of users to share, but in order to make an exchange, users have to be trustworthy and trust each other. Sharing economy organizations say they are committed to building and validating trusted relationships between members of their community, including producers, suppliers, customers or participants. Beyond trusting others (i.e., the peers), the users of a Sharing Economy platform also have to trust the platform itself as well as the product at hand.” (Source: Wikipedia)
The sharing economy is forecast to double in revenue the next 12 months. Today, about 25% of the population of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada takes part in some type of financial or economic sharing, whether that’s requesting a ride with Uber, renting a spare bedroom from Airbnb, a spare driveway at JustPark, a prom dress from Rent The Runway, a neighbor’s car through RelayRides or giving away unwanted stuff on Yerdle.
Sharing saves people time, money and aggravation. But what really reduces friction and increases speed the in this industry is one’s relationship capital. it’s what allows someone to take a ride from a stranger or rent a room in a house from someone they’ve never met. Yet it’s also one of the biggest concerns of using sharing economy services.
According to Pew Research, only 19% of Millennials believe most people can be trusted, while 31% of GenX’ers do. If the future is a peer-to-peer marketplace, it will require increasingly reliable, innovative ways to identify those peers. Making sure this emerging economy has high standards and strong values will allow it to continue to expand.
The Sharing Economy depends on the commitment of the individual user to share, to be able to make an exchange, users must be trustworthy. Sharing economy businesses say they are committed to building and accounting for the relationship capital of trusted relationships between members of their community, including producers, suppliers, customers or participants. In a peer-to-peer marketplace, verifying user identity builds trust, and then the individual user begins to build their online credibility and reputation.
Airbnb was one of the first, but for the sharing economy to continue to grow the way it has, businesses will also have to find ways to verify the identity of consumers and customers This is not as simple process. The peer-to-peer or P2P business model is more complicated than the traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) model. One example is not every person who uses sharing economy services has a passport or a driver’s license or passport to upload, and they may not have a social profile on Linkedin or Facebook. But as more and more of us around the world start to interact in the collaborative marketplace, there is a real need for both quality and relationship capital trust metrics.

Earning Relationship Capital (RC)
Relationship Capital (RC) is an industry standard metric for the accounting of the quality of interactions between “entities”, including people, businesses, and products. Interactions include:
- Declared Commitment Feedback
- Appreciation Recognition
Entities earn RC by keeping declared commitments and obtaining positive feedback. They receive a Relationship Capital Points (RCPs) for each fulfilled Commitment, and RCPs, appreciation recognition received. RCPs are deposited in the user’s account under the strict control of its owner entity.
Building a Credible Reputation with PE-ER SaaS
Authenticated Identification — First step of in scoring relationship capital between individuals who do not know each other is authenticating that they are who they say they are. This is foundational for the sharing economy to thrive. Firms such as Trulioo verify identities online through their electronic identity verification product GlobalGateway, which currently provides identity authentication for over 3 billion people in more than 40 countries.
Obviously, data and technology are critical to enabling this solution. We all have generated huge amounts of information about ourselves because of all our activities we do on and offline. All of this data can be extremely valuable for analyzing a person’s identity, particularly for an individual who does not have more conventional ways of being authenticated. As individual pieces of data, they are not enough to comprehend just who an individual person really is, and they aren’t particularly well categorized. But accrue these pieces of data in combination, arrange them, analyze them; and they become an extremely reliable way to authenticate an identity. Innovators that have leveraged data as an alternative, or as an addition, to the traditional forms of identity include PayPal, eBay, and Airbnb.
With almost 3 billion people now online, we should continue to leverage open standards, algorithms, and data to create more confidence in the P2P sharing marketplace, so that it can continue to sustain and grow.
In the post-trust era of skepticism, the more relationship capital “cred” we can assess, capture, measure, and utilize with our peers the more we can be trusted in order to continue to:
- Share
- Rent
- Barter
- Trade
Introducing the Credibility Reliability Index (CRI)
The Credibility Reliability Index (CRI) is a measurement that was developed as part of the PE-ER SaaS platform to establish a basis for understanding trust and focus on being trustworthy. The basic premise is, the more commitments you successfully keep the more reliable you will be and hence more trustworthy.
Therefore, it’s really quite simple. The higher the Credibility Reliability Index or CRI, the more reliable the individual or company is to deliver on their commitments or promises; the lower the score, the less reliable they are.
As a guideline the Credibility Reliability Index figure is calculated as a combination of:
- The number of commitments you met or exceeded on the timeline,
- The number of commitments that you missed delivery on,
- The total number of points available for commitments requested
- The feedback scores received on all completed commitments
So it’s not simply a case of recording how many commitments you make — it’s much more comprehensive than that and the data is constantly updated.

Conclusion
In the post-trust era, the sharing economy is dependent on p2p interactions based on credibility, reputation, and trustworthiness. For this economic growth to continue, we need to continue to be smarter about trust or more specifically about “trustworthiness” online. Just as the “FICO Score” here in the United States is required to validate creditworthiness, so my belief that industry standards of Relationship Capital (RC) combined with data and technology create greater levels of transparency. This will not only be good for business but allow greater democratization of business opportunities. Independent contractors and small business are able to standout out from large business competition by building a credible reputation. In the post-trust era, the only things you truly own are your actions and relationship capital.
