FAQ
Questions, answered plainly.
What Trustward is, how it keeps real data out of your team's AI tools, and what you get as the CFO. If your question isn't here, request demo access and ask us directly.
What is Trustward?
Trustward is a governed environment for the apps your finance team builds with AI. It sits between your team's AI coding tool and your real systems, and every app built in it lands on a live map, with the data it touches, an audit trail, and an off switch, without reading a line of code.
Do I need to understand the technology?
No. You work in plain language. You see the apps, approve the data, and keep the off switch. The engineering runs underneath.
Will this slow my team down?
No. They keep the tool they already use and the way they already work. Trustward governs the data connection and the runtime around them, so the build stays fast and the controls run on their own.
Can my team keep the AI coding tools they already use?
Yes. Your team keeps Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or a hosted builder, and the way they already work. Trustward governs the data connection and the runtime around the tool, not the authoring, so you never have to vet each new AI tool your team adopts. One mechanism, the broker, protects them all.
What about the apps my team has already built?
Those are exactly the ones you can't see today. As teams move into Trustward, each app gets enrolled with an owner, its data, and a tier, so the unknowns become a list you can act on.
What is shadow AI, and why does it matter for finance?
Shadow AI is software and data processing that employees create with AI tools outside any review or inventory. In finance it's acute: an AI-built app can touch the operating account, the AP and AR subledgers, and payroll. Trustward is the answer by prevention: give the team a governed place to build, and every app ships with an owner, the data it touches, and an off switch, on the books from day one.
How risky is AI-generated code?
Veracode's 2025 analysis of over 100 models found about 45% of AI-generated code fails security tests, and the security pass rate has stayed near 55% even as coding benchmarks climbed. You can't prompt your way to safe code, so Trustward enforces deterministic controls in the pipeline rather than trusting the model to be careful.
Is my data safe with you?
Your data stays inside your own cloud. Trustward runs there, reads data in place, and never copies it out to us. Real data never reaches the AI coding tool, at build time or after.
How is Trustward different from tools like Vanta or Drata?
Vanta and Drata became the control layer for your security posture. Trustward does the same for the apps your team builds with AI: everything built in it gets a live inventory entry, lineage, and an attestation a CFO can sign honestly. It's finance-native and bring-your-own-tool, which the security-posture and platform incumbents don't reach.
Does Trustward work for PE-backed or portfolio companies?
Yes. If a sponsor sits one level up, the apps your team builds are part of the control environment a buyer inspects at exit. Trustward gives the portfolio company a governed place to build, with a live inventory and audit trail for every app that ships through it, and gives the sponsor the same visibility across the portfolio.
How hard is it to start?
You request demo access, we review the request, and approved members get a sign-in link to the live demo. From there you start with one workflow, like the 13-week cash forecast, working directly with our team. No long IT project to stand it up.
What is the broker?
The broker is the part of Trustward that holds the only real credentials to your systems. Instead of handing an app a live database password, it issues a scope-bound, short-lived credential and enforces the limits inside the database itself: which rows, which columns, what's masked. The AI tool never sees a real key.
Where does my data live, and do you train AI on it?
Your data stays in your own cloud, and Trustward reads it in place. We never copy it out to us, and we never use it to train any model. Real data never reaches the AI coding tool, at build time or after.
What actually runs at the deployed link?
The app your builder actually built — not a mock-up and not a substitute viewer. Because that code is AI-generated, Trustward treats it as untrusted: the app is built blind to real data (it reads numbers from a data seam Trustward controls, which is verified before publish), and it runs contained in a frame with no outside network access and no credentials. Real, scoped, masked data is injected at the moment the page renders, and every read is logged. So what you share is the real app, and what the app can do is bounded by the frame it runs in.
Which systems does Trustward connect to?
The private preview runs entirely on a governed, schema-faithful synthetic finance dataset (bank, AP and AR subledgers, payroll, vendor list, and general ledger), so you can evaluate every control without connecting anything. In a production deployment the broker reads your systems in place, starting with data that lives in Postgres or your warehouse. Packaged connectors for common mid-market stacks like QuickBooks, NetSuite, and Sage Intacct are on the roadmap, prioritized with design partners.
Does Trustward run in my cloud or yours?
The production architecture is bring-your-own-cloud: Trustward runs inside your cloud or VPC, reads data in place, and never copies it out to us. The private preview is the one deliberate exception: the demo is hosted by us and touches only synthetic data, so there's nothing of yours to protect while you evaluate.
Is Trustward SOC 2 certified?
Not yet, and we won't claim otherwise. The controls are demonstrable today: designed, documented, and shown working, and built toward certification. The registry and audit export are designed to produce SOC 2 and SOX evidence, and we'll show you the control surface running before you commit.
Which AI coding tools does Trustward support?
Trustward is built bring-your-own-tool. The broker presents as an ordinary Postgres database and a REST endpoint, so there's no SDK to learn. The current pilot runs the fully governed path with terminal-based tools like Claude Code, and the architecture extends to Cursor, Codex, and hosted builders. Either way, Trustward governs the data and runtime around whatever tool your team opens.
What happens to an app when it's no longer needed?
Every app in the registry has an owner, a time-to-live, and an off switch. When a workflow is done or an app goes stale, you retire it in one click. No orphaned app left wired to production, owned by no one.
Still have a question?
Request access to the demo and work directly with the team building Trustward.