New Delhi, May 25 -- The global economy runs on trust. But the way that trust is generated, priced and enforced is changing in ways that are becoming difficult to ignore.

For much of the last century, economic systems leaned heavily on people. Deals rested on reputation, institutions derived authority from history and regulators, boards and intermediaries acted as buffers against bad behaviour. This was the soft architecture of trust-part judgement, part process, part perception.

It worked well enough. I made a good living on the anvil of soft trust for many years, doing large-scale outsourcing deals. And then, after we realized these deals needed to be governed over their lifecycle, I stood up a 500-person transaction governance practi...