Success Quote by Julie Sweet

“Trust is the new currency in business” borrows the clean authority of a financial metaphor to smuggle in a sharper claim: the real scarce resource isn’t capital anymore, it’s credibility. Julie Sweet, speaking from the C-suite in an era of platform scandals, supply-chain shocks, and AI-fueled uncertainty, frames trust as something you earn, bank, spend, and lose fast. That choice of “currency” is doing heavy work. It suggests liquidity (trust must circulate), exchange value (it buys patience during failures), and inflation risk (empty ESG pledges, performative ethics, and “privacy-first” marketing devalue the whole system).

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the old playbook that treated reputation as a branding problem and compliance as a cost center. If trust is currency, then governance, transparency, and customer protections stop being moral accessories and become balance-sheet assets. It also signals a shift in where power sits: consumers, employees, regulators, and partners can now deplatform, boycott, leak, or quit with unprecedented speed. That volatility makes trust less like a nice-to-have and more like collateral.

There’s a strategic intent here, too. Sweet is effectively telling businesses that competitive advantage has moved upstream from product features to institutional behavior: how you handle data, layoffs, bias, outages, and misinformation. In a low-trust public sphere, the firms that can credibly say “we won’t screw you” aren’t just virtuous; they’re investable.