25 executives redefining how businesses establish trust in the AI era have been recognised in the Trust 25, a new industry recognition programme. Honourees span banking, payments, gaming, and technology, reflecting the breadth of industries now confronting AI-driven fraud, authentication, and the rise of AI agents. The inaugural class draws from a wide swath of the economy including global banks, payment networks, e-commerce marketplaces, gaming platforms, and technology companies, underscoring how identity, fraud, and authentication have become board-level priorities across every sector.
Honourees were selected from hundreds of nominations by an independent panel of industry experts, who evaluated each leader’s impact, innovation, and contributions to advancing trust in the digital economy. The final list spans five categories including, Identity, Payments, Customer Experience, Agentic Commerce, and Fraud & Compliance.
“These leaders are defining what trust looks like in a world where AI is changing how people interact and transact online,” said Rodger Desai, Co-Founder and CEO of Prove. “As it becomes harder to know who or what is on the other side of a digital interaction, identity becomes even more foundational. The Trust 25 recognizes the people building the systems, standards, and strategies that will make trusted digital relationships possible in this next era.”
The Trust 25 honourees represent organisations including Uber, Amazon, Citi, Bank of America, U.S. Bank, TD, PayPal, Visa, Stripe, eBay, FanDuel Group, Fanatics Betting and Gaming, Synchrony Financial, AvidXchange, Care.com, and others illustrating that the challenge of establishing digital trust is no longer confined to financial services alone.
Across every category, honourees are addressing the identity trust challenges of the AI era.
- Identity executives are architecting systems where verification is not a single event but a continuous, adaptive process that persists across the customer relationship.
- Payments innovators are rethinking authentication as money moves faster and increasingly without a human directly initiating the transaction.
- Customer experience leaders are proving that security and seamless design are not in tension, using identity signals to reduce friction for trusted users while targeting it precisely where risk exists.
- Agentic commerce pioneers are building the standards and infrastructure needed to let AI agents shop, pay, and act on consumers’ behalf without surrendering control, consent, or accountability.
- Fraud & compliance leaders are moving beyond static rules toward real-time, layered signals that can detect AI-generated impersonation and social engineering without penalizing legitimate customers.
The announcement comes as AI transforms both sides of the digital trust equation. Generative AI has made synthetic identities, deepfake documents, and voice-cloned social engineering attacks dramatically easier to produce at scale. At the same time, a new category of actor, the autonomous AI agent, is emerging, capable of making purchases, signing up for services, and moving money on a person’s behalf.
