This top bank will supply you with a 'trust passport' for the gig economy

Not long ago, it seemed unlikely anyone would be comfortable sleeping in a stranger's house or riding in their car. That idea is now the foundation of multi-billion dollar companies.

To get there, Airbnb and Uber basically commodified trust, largely by allowing users to review each other as a form of accountability and, until now, Australian online jobs marketplace Airtasker followed a similar route.

The platform allows people to bid for jobs, like assembling furniture or mounting a television, similar to America's TaskRabbit.

According to Tim Fung, founder and CEO of Airtasker, building accountability from scratch is not always efficient. A partnership announced Tuesday between his company and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) will aim to import some old-school trust into the gig economy.

For joint customers, a "CommBank Identified" badge can be added to their Airtasker profile as part of a pilot program, indicating their name and date of birth have all been verified by the bank. In other words, if you hire "John Smith" to mow your lawn, you can be pretty certain it's in fact John Smith knocking on your front door.

"We don't necessarily have to try and build trust with people from the ground-up again," Fung said. "Because I think that these huge databases of information, whether it's the road and motoring authority, whether it's the banks, whether it's other people that you've worked with -- all these people are storing components of your 'trust or reputation passport.'"

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

For Fung, trust is a spectrum. When he started Airtasker, he accepted they'd be the type of place where you'd hire someone to hand out fliers, but not necessarily to find a babysitter.

"As we've grown, we've become more ambitious," he said. "We've launched police checks this year, which is a badge you can have on your profile, we've launched the CBA partnership, and we'll have more."

Pete Steel, executive general manager of digital at CBA, said the opt-in pilot was about "stitching banking and digital economy together." It allows joint customers to transfer their good standing with the bank to a new digital platform, he suggested, and could extend to similar sharing economy platforms in the future.

Your 'trust passport'

As well as verifying identity, the badge could indicate other things about your relationship with the bank -- although Steel wouldn't elaborate on what exactly those would be.

"Maybe you're a five-star customer, a three star-customer, maybe you have a certain balance sheet with us," Steel explained. "We've thought about some of those things but we want it to be customer-driven."

While he couldn't say how many customers CBA and Airtasker shared, Steel pointed out the bank has a relationship with almost one in three Australian adults. Airtasker claims to have more than 950,000 users.

That's a sizeable number who could have misgivings about their financial privacy. The market dominance of CBA also means that checks and balances are essential so that customers with spotty bank histories don't find their past haunting them on new platforms.

Steel said customer comfort was foremost in their mind. "We're very conscious of wanting to turbo-charge the sharing economy, not really constrain anyone," he added. Fung also emphasised no financial data would be displayed on the site.

Of course, the pilot also begs the question: should the banks be the arbiters of trust for the gig economy when Australians don't always trust them? A 2016 study by Ernst & Young found that only 36 percent of traditional bank customers in Australia had complete trust in their provider.

Steel pushed back on the bank's bad press. "Fundamentally people still have, I think, a very good view of the bank and the role we play," he said. "For both someone like Airtasker and us to do this sort of partnership, we not only shake hands, we think about the brand affinity as well -- is it a natural pairing that customers will find appropriate?"

As banking gets shaken up by fintech startups, he believes there may be an additional role for financial institutions in providing, as Fung put it, a "trust passport."

"Trust and security are right at the centre of who we are -- it's one of the things a bank should do well," Steel said. "We certainly are in a good position where we know a third of adult Australians. And so how can we help them grow their businesses and meet financial goals in this emerging digital economy?"