Trust is shifting from human judgement to machine-readable proof.

# Welcome & Trusted Shops Vision — #trstd connect Amsterdam

Roy Malaiaars: Yes, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I think the microphone is working properly. The presentation is on the screen, so we can begin. I can still see Ludo standing over there, but he'll be joining us in a moment.

Roy Malaiaars: First of all, thank you very much for all coming here. I think about three or four months ago we came up with the idea, also considering everything that is happening in the market, but also within Trusted Shops, to organise our #trstd connect event. It is an initiative that we would actually like to bring back every year. This is the very first edition, so we're very happy that we've been able to organise it so nicely. And with the location, we took a bit of a gamble on having good weather. Well, fortunately that worked out perfectly.

Roy Malaiaars: Just briefly about the day itself. We aimed to have around 20 partners here. That worked out. I think we're at around 17, unfortunately with three last-minute cancellations. But thank you to everyone for coming here.

Roy Malaiaars: In short, the title of the presentation is The Impact of Trust in the Age of AI. Of course, there is a lot happening in the market when it comes to trust. I think everyone here works with different entrepreneurs who are active in e‑commerce, or with companies that do something in e‑commerce. And the theme of trust in the age of AI is really at the centre of this morning.

Roy Malaiaars: Let me just see whether the clicker is working properly. The agenda also looks very nice, I think. Just briefly, I don't know whether everyone can read it properly, but I know what's on it. We start with an introduction to Trusted Shops: where we're heading and what we're seeing in the market.

Roy Malaiaars: Then Jesper from Factor Blue will talk about the online success of K-Parts. K-Parts is a shared customer of ours and, on our side, one of our largest customers. I'm very happy that Jesper is willing to do that.

Roy Malaiaars: Then we'll have a short break. After that, Marlijne from Bookerz will take us through her presentation, From Review to Result. And then we will finish the morning with a panel talk with three experts, if I may call them that, where we'll discuss the developments taking place in the market from three different perspectives.

Roy Malaiaars: After that, we'll present this nice award. That's something we want to start doing from this year onwards, and we call it the Trusted Shops Partner of the Year.

Roy Malaiaars: And finally, there will be lunch for the people who are staying for the afternoon. Around 80 entrepreneurs will be joining us this afternoon — or, in any case, around 80 people from roughly 50 companies. It's a mix of our customers and perhaps potential customers.

Roy Malaiaars: Our CEO, together with AWS — Amazon Web Services — will give a presentation about how we at Trusted Shops are building the new digital infrastructure for trust. So if you don't have anything planned this afternoon — I've informed everyone about it — please stay after lunch. And if not, you'll definitely get to see the presentation afterwards.

Roy Malaiaars: Briefly, this is me, of course. Everyone knows me. But my manager, Ella, is also here today. There they are. A little over a year ago, we started restructuring and centralising all partner managers across Europe so that we could provide more value to our partners across the market. One of the starting points was that we got a manager for the entire partnerships team. So I'm happy that she's here.

Roy Malaiaars: She is German-speaking, so if you want to talk to her, talk to her in English. And she needs to practise her Dutch, so give her a bit of a test in Dutch as well.

Roy Malaiaars: Just briefly, everyone here has in some way come into contact with our proposition through their relationship with Trusted Shops. But 25 years ago, we started in Cologne, Germany, as legal advisers for German online shops.

Roy Malaiaars: At the time, it was purely about providing legal advice. I think everyone has probably had some experience with an entrepreneur entering the German market. And German consumers are simply very different — much more critical and more cautious than Dutch consumers.

Roy Malaiaars: So we started as legal advisers, and over 25 years — last year we celebrated our 25th anniversary — we grew into what is essentially a three-in-one trust solution.

Roy Malaiaars: On the one hand, we are a closed review platform. In other words, we link the review request that online shops can send to their customers to the transaction. That means a review can only be left by a consumer who has actually made a purchase.

Roy Malaiaars: On the other hand, we offer the Trustmark, the logo you can see there. As soon as you place the Trustmark on your shop, Buyer Protection becomes available. And with that, we protect purchases made by consumers from online shops that work with us.

Roy Malaiaars: We do that roughly a million times a day. We currently do this for around 40,000 online shops across Europe, and we receive around 50,000 reviews every day.

Roy Malaiaars: All the data points that we generate every day also form the basis for the proposition that we are currently building together with Amazon. You'll hear a little more about that shortly, and it will also be covered in much more detail this afternoon.

Roy Malaiaars: What does this proposition actually do? I hope you can see it reasonably well. I don't know whether part of it disappears on the screen, but that's okay. I'll read it out.

Roy Malaiaars: On the one hand, you can collect reviews. We also do a lot of A/B testing with our customers from within the platform. You can run A/B tests from the back office, and we often do that together with partners to really measure our value.

Roy Malaiaars: We don't just want to promise what we deliver; we also want to demonstrate it. So we work a lot with agencies as well, so that they can carry out those A/B tests with our Trustbadge.

Roy Malaiaars: On average, that leads to an increase in conversion. If you implement all the trust elements and our Buyer Protection widgets properly, we see an increase of around 5 to 15% in conversion.

Roy Malaiaars: We measure that by making our Trustbadge invisible for one period and visible for another, so that we can properly measure the impact.

Roy Malaiaars: We also see an average increase of around 10% in purchase value when Buyer Protection is used. In the dashboard that every customer has with us, you can clearly see the impact depending on whether Buyer Protection is used or not.

Roy Malaiaars: Another nice new launch we introduced at the beginning of this year — or perhaps about three months ago — is something Jesper will come back to in more detail in his presentation: we launched review syndication.

Roy Malaiaars: What that essentially means is that we work with businesses that have domains across Europe. In the past, whenever you opened a new domain or entered a new market, you had to start from zero again with your social proof. You couldn't show the product reviews or shop reviews you had already collected in other countries.

Roy Malaiaars: That's different now. As Jesper will explain in a little more detail later, if you work with us as a customer and open a new domain or start working with us in a new market, you can immediately display all the shop and product reviews you've already collected.

Roy Malaiaars: But that's enough on that for now. I won't spend too much more time on Trusted Shops, because you're here at #trstd connect. And the reason it's called #trstd connect has to do with what we're currently communicating internally and increasingly to our customers as well: the trust shift — the future of online trust in the age of AI.

Roy Malaiaars: Why are we talking about that? First, I think it's useful to briefly look at a few figures showing that trust is under pressure.

Roy Malaiaars: I think everyone sitting here has probably had some personal experience with fraud. Maybe you're an Odido customer, or perhaps a Booking.com customer. As consumers, we're all being confronted with it.

Roy Malaiaars: And that also means that one in three consumers has doubts when making a purchase. These are studies carried out across Europe. So that is the effect it has on consumers.

Roy Malaiaars: But ultimately, it also harms online retailers. The police recently warned on NOS about the large number of fake advertisements on platforms such as Meta, where a Facebook or Instagram ad can lead you to a fake shop.

Roy Malaiaars: And on that fake shop, you'll see very attractive product prices. For example, there was recently an ING article about Studio Anneloes, which is also a customer of De Nieuwe Zaak. They have to deal on a weekly basis with their shop being copied and products being shown there at unrealistic prices.

Roy Malaiaars: Every time a consumer falls for that, it harms Studio Anneloes. First, they lose potential revenue. And second, when the customer later returns to the real Studio Anneloes shop, they may start wondering whether that one is actually the real shop.

Roy Malaiaars: We call this the age of fakes, and unfortunately we're hearing about it more and more often. We expect it only to increase because of how easy it has become nowadays to copy an entire online shop.

Roy Malaiaars: This week, for example, we received an application from a shop that claimed in every respect to be Kobelco.nl. It had copied the entire shop. When we looked at the address, we saw that it had already changed three times in a single week. At that point, you know it's a fake shop.

Roy Malaiaars: But the key point is the effect this ultimately has on how consumers experience trust. If you arrive at a fake shop as a consumer, you still have your own eyes and judgement to decide: do I trust this or not?

Roy Malaiaars: That development is only going to accelerate, and we're increasingly moving towards a phase where AI agents will arrive at your customers' shops and make purchases.

Roy Malaiaars: That introduces another problem, because AI agents experience trust very differently.

Roy Malaiaars: As humans, we tend to trust something in a fairly absolute way. You either trust something or you don't. Just as you trust your friends or your family, you can trust a product or, of course, a brand. You may use reviews or other information to make that judgement.

Roy Malaiaars: Agents and AI look at trust differently. They look at trust signals such as reputation, intent, certainty, behaviour and also social proof.

Roy Malaiaars: And that is precisely where the biggest challenge lies, because those are exactly the elements that are very easy to fake in an age of fake shops, fake reviews and so on.

Roy Malaiaars: The consequence could be that when an agent ultimately makes a choice on behalf of a consumer, fake shops may be preferred over the genuine online shop. Trust then becomes a gamble for an agent instead of something established on the basis of facts.

Roy Malaiaars: That creates a situation where businesses that, for example, work with us may lose business to fake shops. At Trusted Shops, we want to do something about that.

Roy Malaiaars: That's why, over the past year and a half, we've been working with AWS — Amazon Web Services — to build a new digital infrastructure for trust.

Roy Malaiaars: I'll briefly explain how we do that. In practice, trust used to be something between a person and a brand, or between a person and an online shop. You could use reviews, the Trustmark and Buyer Protection to decide whether you trusted it or not.

Roy Malaiaars: In the foreseeable future, there will be an AI agent in between. That AI agent will decide on behalf of a consumer whether it trusts something.

Roy Malaiaars: Perhaps at first it will only make the selection, but we'll move very quickly towards agents also making the final choice and completing the transaction.

Roy Malaiaars: We want there to be an infrastructure in place in which an agent prefers the genuine online shop over the fake shop. And that is what we call #trstd.

Roy Malaiaars: That is also why you're here at #trstd connect and not Trusted Shops Connect.

Roy Malaiaars: In practice, it consists of two things. Very simply, there is the #trstd Login, which we add to the online shops that work with our Trustbadge. A small switch appears there, and as a consumer you can activate it.

Roy Malaiaars: When you switch it on, you log into our infrastructure once and create an account as a consumer. Every time you subsequently visit an online shop with #trstd Login, you immediately see at the top of the screen that the website has been verified by our system. That system is supported by Amazon.

Roy Malaiaars: But that's the consumer side. For agents, behind that #trstd Login there is a layer of data containing social proof, the identity of the online shop, whether Buyer Protection is activated and how often it is activated.

Roy Malaiaars: That data then feeds what we call the #trstd <protocol>.

Roy Malaiaars: The protocol is currently live, but it isn't actively being used yet because we're still developing it. But we see a future where agents can rely on that protocol and, in that way, prefer genuine online shops and distinguish them from fake ones.

Roy Malaiaars: This is something we're actively testing at the moment. For those staying this afternoon, it will be presented in much more detail by our CEO together with AWS. It's something we're fully committed to.

Roy Malaiaars: That doesn't mean Trusted Shops itself is fundamentally changing. If you want to make use of that protocol, you need to build social proof and you need to have an identity. Trusted Shops can provide that verification.

Roy Malaiaars: And we have the advantage that we're a closed review platform in which reviews are linked to the actual transaction, and that we can also provide Buyer Protection and an additional level of certainty to the market.

Roy Malaiaars: This is roughly what it looks like in practice. I don't know how clearly you can see it. Otherwise I'll send it afterwards. You can see a small switch here. I don't know whether it's visible, but you activate that switch. Then you log in once and go through these steps.

Roy Malaiaars: I think I'll show this in more detail after today and send it around nicely so that everyone has an example.

Roy Malaiaars: The Login is already live, by the way. So with customers of yours who already work with us, you can see it on the Trustbadge and you can already test it. I think that's definitely interesting.

Roy Malaiaars: Finally, before I hand over to Jesper, the Trustbadge AI+ essentially looks like this.

Roy Malaiaars: The vision is that it protects against copycats and fake online shops. And our expectation is that the moment a consumer arrives at an online shop and sees that switch, they will turn it on.

Roy Malaiaars: We also have a community of around 50 million consumers who have used Buyer Protection at some point, and we can actively inform them about this.

Roy Malaiaars: At the same time, we expect an even greater effect to come from agents being able to read the data behind it.

Roy Malaiaars: That's what we're currently working very hard on, and it will be covered extensively this afternoon.

Roy Malaiaars: So, does anyone have any questions about that? It will be discussed in much more detail this afternoon.

Roy Malaiaars: With that, I'd like to hand over to Jesper. I'll just switch the presentation.

Roy Malaiaars: Jesper and I have been working together for about a year now. Factor Blue and Trusted Shops have been working together for longer. We serve a number of great customers, and I think, if I may say so, the nicest one is probably K-Parts.

Roy Malaiaars: So he's going to present what they have done with Factor Blue to achieve that online success, and also briefly explain the role Trusted Shops has played in it.

Roy Malaiaars: I'm very happy that you're willing to do it. So, great. Please give Jesper a round of applause.