I always thought "Trust" was an album by Elvis Costello until I started working in the City of London.

I quickly learned that much of everything we did in the City and in the global financial community relied on trust. You trust that your bank will look after your money, you trust that your broker will get you the best price for your shares, you trust that the FX broker will get you the best GBP/USD rate and that your bank will pay you the best rate of interest. Sometimes when that trust is misplaced you simply take your business elsewhere. Other times misplaced trust can have graver consequences - in 1974 if you sold Japanese Yen to Bankhaus Herstatt in exchange for US Dollars, and delivered your yen trusting that Bankhaus Herstatt would do likewise with their dollars, you probably would have lost a lot of money.

So we rely on trust when dealing with our counterparties as they do when dealing with us. But trust is not a commodity, not something that can be bought or sold, not a tangible object. It's a belief. If the organization you work for believes what a counterparty tells them, then - providing they're permitted to do so - they will be happy to act on that counterparty's instructions.

We rely on trust everyday in both our private and business lives. Increasingly, we trust data or information delivered to us via e-mail, websites, apps, social media and telephone calls - transacting face-to-face is something we rarely do these days. Data and information is exchanged at arms length and in order to trust in it we normally have to believe in three things - that it comes from who it purports to come from, that is has not been tampered or interfered with on its journey between them and us, and that it is not out-of-date. The trick is how to know when you can believe those three things. You could always check with the originator every time you had data or information to act on, but would we ever get any work done, checking everything with everybody all of the time? And how would you know that the originator was who they said they were?

Our byword in the City of London has long been "My word is my bond" - but you need to know who signed the bond, who's changed the bond and where the latest version is.