Trust in Online Marketplaces

Frank McKenna, Chief Fraud Strategist at Point Predictive, has been working in anti-fraud for some 30 years. Also author of the blog FrankonFraud.com, Frank calls on his years of experience to educate readers about leading fraud issues. 

In this episode, Frank talks with Chris and Catherine about how predictive analytics and AI can be used in the fight against fraud. He outlines the advanced techniques fraudsters use to commit their crimes from OTP bots to voice cloning and how 80% of people don't report scams because they feel ashamed.

In this episode of The Trust Series, Elle Tucker, Marketplace Advisor, Sharing & Gig Economy Consultant and Author, joins Chris and Catherine to talk about how the sharing economy has evolved over time and the importance of digital trust and safety for successful growth of sharing economy platforms. She highlights the need for educating consumers around the brand experience for sharing economy platforms and peer-to-peer transactions since it’s often a new way of doing things. Elle also shares experiences from her recent book, ‘Thanks for Sharing’, about how she and her family have been embracing the sharing economy.

#sharingeconomy #trust #p2p

In the first episode of our second series, Catherine and Chris are joined by Brett Hollenbeck, Assistant Professor at UCLA. Brett and his team recently conducted research into online reviews in marketplaces and how they shape the economics of those marketplaces. He was particularly interested to find out how fake reviews are purchased (e.g. Amazon sellers buying reviews in Facebook groups), and what’s happening to these products on the marketplace after they’ve bought fake reviews.

This episode is a very interesting and insightful listen as Brett talks about the emergence of generative AI tools and their ability to bolster fake reviewers’ capabilities and how, as a result, it's even more important to look beyond review content and instead focus on network connections in the fight against fake reviews.  Brett's research aligns with Pasabi's commercial experience of the most effective approach to tackling the fake reviews challenge.

In this session, Catherine and Chris are joined by Polly Applegate, ex-Head of Community at Depop and advisor to online marketplaces, community-led platforms and live streaming. Polly's role at Depop saw her scale her team from 20 to 200 employees globally to provide an exceptionally safe and engaging platform for its user base.

Polly talks about the influence online community-led platforms are having on well-established brands, shifting them towards trying new things, such as Zara offering a resell option and John Lewis providing a clothing rental service.

She highlights the importance of factoring in Trust & Safety early in the startup journey and how online communities foster and grow naturally in trusted environments.
'At Depop in the early days, we were growing mainly through word of mouth. Rather famously, they didn't spend very much on marketing in the first number of years.'

Alexis Alexander, General Counsel of fintech organisation Liberis, joins Chris and Catherine to discuss the power of authenticity in creating trusted professional relationships. In her experience at Liberis, having open and honest conversations with her executive team shows how you can be a leader and progress to the top of the food chain by being yourself. She believes that authenticity allows leaders to build deeper human connections with their teams for more effective leadership.

'I’ve always put trust at the centre of everything I do. If you don’t have trust, you don’t really have anything.’

Jeremy Gottschalk, General Counsel and Marketplace Risk founder, discusses the importance of risk, trust and safety for marketplaces and platforms and encourages them to adopt mitigation strategies early. With the traditional focus being on growth, Jeremy believes VCs aren’t currently thinking about these issues. He founded Marketplace Risk out of a working group of lawyers, founders, execs and CEOs that originally met quarterly to discuss legal, trust, risk and safety issues and share their experiences. As it rapidly expanded, Jeremy decided it was an opportunity to aggregate relevant content and provide it to startups for free or via conferences at a low cost.
'My perspective is to always be transparent.’ 

Colin McCarthy, founder of Legal Operators, joins Catherine and Chris to talk about the key role trust plays in starting and building a community. Noticing the need for a truly collaborative community focused on best practices, Colin founded Legal Operators. Starting out as a small group of 12 like-minded people, Legal Operators has rapidly expanded over a two year period to being a global community of 8,000 legal operations professionals. 
At its core, Legal Operators is about people coming together to collaborate and share information, drop barriers and improve the industry.  Colin outlines the effect the Covid pandemic had on the community, how pivoting to online early in 2020 helped Legal Operators to expand and the challenges building a community involves.
‘Trust is the foundation of any good relationship.’

Pedro Pina, VP Head of YouTube for Europe, Middle East and Africa, has been named as one of Europe’s leading LGBT+ role models. Pedro explores the ways in which brands can build and maintain trust with diverse employees and consumers. He highlights the importance of companies having visibility of under-represented groups at leadership levels and the role brands have in helping embrace diversity.

‘There is this idea that the under-represented groups are the ones that need to make the change...they can’t. The clue is in the name - they are under-represented, so they can’t!’

Barry Eichengreen, economist and professor at UC Berkeley and Orkun Saka, assistant professor of Economics at City, University of London discuss the decline of trust in scientists, how this has manifested during the pandemic and what this means going forward for society as a whole.

‘There is a decline in trust in scientists as individuals and scientists as a collection of people, but not as an endeavour.’

Olga Mack, CEO of Parley Pro, a Blockchain Strategist and author, outlines her own experiences which led her to have an interest in blockchain, including emigrating to the US from the former Soviet Union at a young age. 

‘The trust we place in institutions sometimes works .. but sometimes it doesn’t and when it doesn’t, it really has an impact on you as an individual, as a family and as a society.’