Why Trust and Safety Is a Growth Function

Trust and safety is generally funded as an insurance policy. It is the team that deals with the bad things, and its budget is defended by describing what might otherwise happen. That framing is accurate and also why the function struggles for money every year. This piece draws on a conversation on the Know Your People podcast with Spencer Chee, who leads First Advantage’s gig platforms and marketplaces on verification and monitoring.

The measurement problem

A trust and safety program that works produces an absence. No incident, no headline, no post-mortem. Absences are difficult to put in a board pack, and the function ends up measured by the things that got through rather than by the quality it maintained.

Why the budget case loses on format

Quantitative business cases arrive with a cost, a return, and a payback period, which is a shape decision-makers are trained to evaluate. Qualitative risk arrives as a scenario with no arithmetic attached. It is not a weaker argument. It is an argument in a format that loses to the other one by default, and treating that as a math problem rather than a framing problem is what keeps the outcome the same.

Some risks genuinely cannot be quantified, and a person’s safety is the obvious case. Forcing it into a spreadsheet misrepresents it. The more honest move is to argue it as what it is — a decision about consequence and quality — and to stop pretending it is a costing exercise.

The growth version of the same argument

There is a version of this that does not need the defensive frame at all. Better trust outcomes attract and retain better workers. Those workers are the ones who carry a platform’s reputation through every delivery, every ride, and every customer interaction, which means the function is producing conditions for growth rather than protecting growth from harm.

That also aligns two teams that usually negotiate against each other. Trust & Safety and brand leaders are protecting the same reputation on different timescales; one solving for today’s activation and one for the trust that will still exist in three years.

Where to start

Set a foundation early. A minimal risk assessment process built on day one is much easier to scale than controls retrofitted once volume arrives. And be precise about which control answers which question since identity verification and background screening are answering different ones. Our piece on the four layers of workforce trust sets out how they fit together.

Takeaway: a function that prevents things will always struggle to prove it. Fund it for what it produces instead.

Listen or get the one-page version, Making the Budget Case for Trust and Safety.

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