This chapter analyses the consumer credit relationship through the interconnected concepts of trust and power. Drawing on the wider literature, it establishes trust as a reciprocal, two-way process, and introduces a seven-domain framework to assess the balance between trust and power in a relationship: coercion at entry, trustee power, control measures, reliance on guarantors or insurance, opportunities for repeated interaction, reciprocity, and breach handling. Application of this framework reveals a profound asymmetry: lenders exhibit weak trust, relying on rigid contracts, intensive monitoring, and punitive responses, while borrowers must extend high trust despite having little power and being coerced into relationships with credit reporting agencies. This configuration of low lender trust, high borrower trust, and strong lender power results in a system governed by surveillance and conditionality. The analysis provides a critical foundation for the book’s subsequent examination of information asymmetries and the development of its ‘trust intelligence’ approach to reform.