As enterprises accelerate digital transformation, customer experience (CX) leaders are increasingly focused on tightening security, safeguarding privacy, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
In 2026, emerging threats such as AI-powered deepfakes, high-impact data breaches, and evolving standards like PCI DSS 4.0 are reshaping risk landscapes while privacy and compliance functions are moving from checkbox activities to strategic drivers of trust and competitive differentiation.
Together, the latest industry research highlights how organizations can blend security, privacy, and compliance into CX strategies that build confidence without compromising innovation.
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Unmasking Cybercrime: Strengthening Digital Identity Verification against Deepfakes
The World Economic Forum investigate how deepfake technology – AI-generated audio and visual media – is now a material threat to digital identity systems.
It explains how deepfakes can undermine remote verification processes like KYC, enabling fraud and impersonation at individual and systemic levels, and outlines practical countermeasures, including real-time anomaly detection, improved liveness checks, and coordinated governance frameworks to preserve digital trust.
Keep Calm and Simplify: Contact Center Best Practices in the Era of PCI DSS 4.0
Published jointly by PCI Pal and Verizon, this whitepaper focuses on modern contact center security and compliance under the updated PCI DSS 4.0 standard. It walks through why contact centers must simplify compliance strategies, reduce PCI scope, and adopt best practices that protect cardholder data while maintaining seamless CX.
The Privacy Advantage: Building Trust in a Digital World
Cisco’s 2025 Data Privacy Benchmark Study shows privacy isn’t just a regulatory requirement – it’s a strategic asset that builds trust and competitive advantage. Drawing on a global survey of privacy professionals, it finds that organisations see data privacy investments delivering tangible benefits, with regulation increasingly viewed as a driver of trust.
It highlights rising focus on data localisation, AI governance, and the role of privacy frameworks in strengthening customer confidence and securing long-term relationships.
The State of Digital Trust
Recent State of Digital Trust reports (such as those by Usercentrics and DigiCert) paint trust as the foundation of all digital interactions. They show that transparency around data use, consent management, and privacy-led marketing are now central to earning loyalty.
Consumers are growing more privacy-aware and actively assessing how brands handle their data – meaning digital trust is no longer a compliance checkbox but a core CX differentiator vital for retention and growth.
2025 Data Breach Investigations Report
The 2025 Verizon DBIR provides one of the most authoritative views of the current cyber threat landscape, analysing over 22,000 incidents including 12,000 confirmed breaches. The report shows rising exploitation of vulnerabilities, credential abuse, increased involvement of third parties in breaches, and ubiquitous ransomware activity.
It underscores why security must be embedded across all customer-facing and backend systems. Actionable recommendations centre on strong authentication, proactive patching, and awareness-driven training to mitigate emerging risks.
PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025
PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025 captures the evolving role of compliance in a complex and interconnected business environment. Based on feedback from over 1,800 senior executives across industries and territories, the report highlights how organisations are adapting compliance functions to enable growth, manage digital transformation, and reinvent risk frameworks.
It underscores that compliance is no longer just risk avoidance – it’s about building organizational resilience and stakeholder trust in an era of rapid change.
The CX Industry in 2026
Taken together, these industry reports make one thing clear: in 2026, security, privacy, and compliance are no longer back-office concerns – they are fundamental to delivering trusted, resilient customer experiences.
From defending against AI-driven identity fraud and adapting to PCI DSS 4.0, to treating privacy as a competitive differentiator and elevating compliance into a strategic function, organisations that proactively invest in trust will be better positioned to scale.
For CX leaders, the opportunity lies in embedding these principles seamlessly into every interaction, turning robust governance into a source of confidence, loyalty, and long-term business growth.
