Vero and Kadence International unveil a new consumer trust score that offers a comparative view of Southeast Asia’s digital ecosystem, with insights into what builds, erodes, and restores trust in a highly competitive and fast-evolving industry.
Southeast Asia is moving further into technology-enabled living, but a new regional study finds that consumer trust is becoming more conditional: the technology categories that carry the highest stakes earn the strongest trust but also face the sharpest consequences when that trust is broken.
Online banking and digital payments are the most trusted categories in the region, with trust scores averaging 81.7 and 80.4, respectively. Yet more than half of consumers say they would be quickest to abandon these tech services after a serious incident.
This pattern cuts across markets, gender, and age, providing a clear signal of a shared consumer expectation that when technology handles money and personal data, trust must be protected continuously.
The Southeast Asia Consumer Tech Trust Score, a collaborative study by Vero and Kadence International, examines the levels of trust consumers place in ten tech categories: cloud storage, cybersecurity, e-commerce, digital payments, generative AI, messaging apps, online banking, ride-hailing / delivery, social media, telecom. The insights are drawn from an online survey conducted among more than 3,000 consumers across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
At the heart of the study are category Trust Scores that offer a comparative view of Southeast Asia’s digital ecosystem. Financial technology services, supported by clearer regulation and visible security expectations, emerge as some of the most trusted categories. Telecom, e-commerce, messaging apps, ride-hailing, and cybersecurity form a broad, stable middle– habitual services where trust is solid but not reverential. Social media, despite being among the most frequently used, sits lower in consumer trust. Meanwhile, generative AI has the lowest or second-lowest Trust Score across all markets surveyed, indicating that the newest technology carries the lowest earned trust.
