Trulioo CEO Says Leadership Today Is About Trust, Data and Decision Making

Watch more: What’s Next In Payments: Trulioo’s Vicky Bindra

The connected economy is redrawing the map of how CEOs think about their companies’ long-term futures. It’s magnifying their near-term obligations to customers, shareholders and regulators. And it’s also reshaping how they battle fraud, verify transactions and protect data. As Trulioo CEO Vicky Bindra told PYMNTS in the “What’s Next in Payments: The Year of the CEO” series, “The defining challenge has been reviewing your business model in light of AI.”

AI’s Expanding Reach

Bindra described 2025 as the year CEOs came to grips with what AI really means for their organizations. “Is it machine learning? Is it agents? Or is it generative AI? They’re sort of connected,” he said. “But people talk about them as very different blocks. Your ability to be either influenced, supported or disintermediated by any of these technologies is what’s causing the biggest concern or opportunity for businesses.”

At Trulioo, a global identity platform trusted by leading companies for verification and fraud prevention, Bindra said the company is applying all three forms of AI. “If you look at our risk models and how we look at identity, we use deep machine learning to identify anomalies or challenges with particular transactions or people,” he said. “We’re also at the forefront of thinking through KYA — know your agent — and how to establish identity between the consumer and the agent to ensure the transaction goes well.”

Generative AI, he added, supports Trulioo’s data science and verification models: “We use generative AI across our business to look at data science, models and verification of problems … so that we remain the trusted infrastructure for our customers and for the industry.”

Redefining the CEO’s Dilemma

For Bindra, leading in the connected economy requires balancing innovation with risk, short-term performance with long-term positioning. “Many times, I was taught to think long term and the short term will evolve from that,” he said. The reality is more complex, he said, and demands that CEOs “define the problem sets with our customers — the pain points — and solve them better than anybody else.”

That means automation, data integrity and customer trust must coexist. “Someone may not have an automated environment for onboarding,” he explained. “How do we make sure they do that really well, without manual intervention? Or they’re having a problem with deep fakes or fraud — how do we help them remove false positives?”

Still, longer-term questions persist. “Will scale really matter in the new world, and therefore do you need to acquire or not? Technology will get so complicated that it’ll be hard to do everything on your own,” he said. “Our focus is on staying ahead in the next 18 months, while carving out the differentials that make us the trusted infrastructure over the next three to five years.”

The Customer as North Star

Through it all, Bindra emphasized a constant: “We start and end with the customer.” Trulioo, he said, builds from the inside out by understanding where each client plays in the ecosystem. “If I’m an acquirer, I have responsibility both for proper transactions and for ensuring that merchants are safeguarded against risks and losses,” he said. “We play the role of our customers internally so that we can understand it carefully.”

That empathy, he argued, is both passion and necessity. “We’re only as good as our customers,” Bindra said. “If they don’t have the lowest loss rates or the lowest false positives, our endorsement in the industry stops. So we behave like the customer — not as a supplier, but as a partner in their chair.”

The shift toward agentic commerce, in which autonomous digital agents transact on behalf of humans, has forced Trulioo to broaden its focus beyond onboarding. “So far, our customer’s journey was all about onboarding,” Bindra said. “It started with identity: Have I identified [the customer] correctly, is there any fraud signal, and is he creditworthy? But now, each time a user transacts with an agent, we must verify that the agent is connected to the user’s account and is actually making the transaction.”

That evolution has changed Trulioo’s mandate: “Our remit has gone from onboarding to managing the customer throughout the lifecycle of purchase,” he said. The company’s “core magic,” as Bindra described it, lies in connecting trusted identity verification, fraud detection and creditworthiness insights in a meaningful manner that supports the customer journey end to end.

Good Data as the Foundation of Trust

Asked what CEOs need most to lead effectively in this environment, Bindra’s answer was immediate: “Getting access and owning good data is key to our success. You can talk about AI in different forms, but you can’t replicate good data.”

That belief underpins Trulioo’s long-term advantage. “If we have the ability globally to get access to and own good data, we have a path to play in creating infrastructure for customers,” he said. “Good data is what defines us. Good data is what’s going to keep us in business. Good data is what’s going to differentiate us.”

In a connected economy where agents and algorithms can transact autonomously, Bindra’s message is as much a warning as a vision: Technology may change fast, but trust, data and customer focus remain the constants that CEOs must get right.