I’ve watched this conversation happen in more than one bank, in more than one country, with more than one supervisor. The customer details change. The fee structure changes. The supervisor’s job title changes. The conversation does not. Let me render it once, so you can see what it looks like.
A customer in her late nineties - I’ll call her Mrs. Flint - had been charged a monthly “inactivity” fee on her savings account. Her daughter discovered the accumulated total while helping her sort through paperwork and brought it to the bank's attention. The account, technically, was inactive. Mrs. Flint wasn’t logging in, wasn’t making transactions, wasn’t checking balances online. What 97-year-old does? But the account was also receiving regular interest payments. The money was working. Mrs. Flint was alive, and her bank knew it.
I was asked to weigh in because the daughter was escalating the issue and someone needed to make a recommendation. I argued the case in the meeting: charging an “inactivity” fee on an account that was demonstrably not inactive, to a customer who could not reasonably be expected to monitor her own statements, violated something more fundamental than policy. It violated the relationship the bank had with a person who had trusted us with her money for decades.
The compliance lead heard me out. Then made the call - “Reverse the last three months.” Not the years. The months.
The daughter took the offer because the daughter had a mother to take care of and didn’t have the time or energy to fight a bank. The bank moved on. The fee structure stayed in place. Somewhere in the back office, the next 97-year-old’s penalties were already accumulating, on the same logic, with the same defense ready in the same drawer.
The thing I want to say plainly: That fee was not an accident. It was not a misalignment between policy and customer. It was not an edge case the product team hadn’t considered. The “inactivity” fee was designed, knowingly, by people who understood that the customers least likely to monitor their accounts, i.e the elderly, the cognitively declining, the technologically displaced, would be the customers from whom the fee was most reliably extractable. That is not a customer-service failure. That is a product strategy. And every quarter, in compliance reviews exactly like the one I sat in, the strategy is defended with the same sentence: the policy applies to everyone equally. And It does. That’s the design.
I have worked in financial services across two continents now, and I have watched the same architecture get rebuilt, in slightly different materials, in every institution I’ve consulted with or worked for. Here is the pattern:
- A fee is designed that “applies to everyone.” Inactivity charges. Overdraft cascades. Minimum-balance penalties. Paper-statement fees. Out-of-network ATM stacks. The fee is framed as universal because universality is what makes it legally defensible.
- The fee is calibrated to revenue, not to harm. Internal modeling shows what percentage of customers will trigger the fee, what the average extraction per customer will be, and what the expected revenue is over a 12-month horizon. The modeling does not ask which customers will trigger the fee. It asks how many.
- The customers who actually trigger the fee are not random. They are disproportionately elderly, low-income, non-native-English-speaking, cognitively declining, financially anxious, or simply unfamiliar with how the institution communicates. They are, in other words, the customers least equipped to challenge the fee when it appears on their statement.
- When a complaint surfaces, the resolution is small. Three months reversed. A goodwill credit. A polite letter. The architecture stays. The next customer’s penalties keep accumulating. And the institution carries on telling itself that “we made it right”, for the one customer who happened to have a daughter with the time to make a phone call.
Why is this a design problem, and not a compliance problem? People in my line of work i.e UX researchers, product designers, customer experience strategists etc... like to talk about “designing for the user.” We say it in conference talks. We put it in our LinkedIn bios. We mean it, mostly. But the inactivity fee was also designed for a user. The designer just chose a different one. Every predatory fee in financial services has a designer somewhere in its history. A product manager who modeled the revenue. A compliance officer who confirmed it was legal. A copywriter who buried the disclosure in paragraph 14 of the account agreement. A UX designer who agreed that the activation flow didn’t need to surface the fee schedule clearly because doing so would tank the conversion rate. A researcher who probably never interviewed a single 97-year-old before sign-off.
The design profession likes to imagine itself as a corrective force against extraction. Often it is. Sometimes it is the extraction’s most polished instrument.
If you work in this industry, here are the questions I have learned to ask in product reviews. Not because they always change the outcome, they often don’t, but because asking them on the record is the minimum a professional can do:
- Who is the customer this fee is statistically most likely to hit? Not the average customer. The actual distribution. If the answer is “the elderly,” “the low-income,” 'the people who don’t read English fluently,' or 'people in cognitive decline,' the fee is doing something morally different from what the slide deck claims.
- Would we be comfortable explaining this fee, in plain language, to the customer most likely to pay it? Not the customer who would never pay it. The one who will. If the answer is no, the fee is engineered to operate in the gap between what the customer understands and what the institution discloses. That gap is the product.
- Is the fee load-bearing to the business case, or is it extra revenue? If you remove the fee, does the product still work? If yes, the fee was never part of the product, it was an extraction layer added on top. Those are the fees that disappear first when an institution decides to take its trust relationship seriously.
- When a customer complaint about this fee comes in, what is the resolution protocol? If the answer is “we reverse a portion as a goodwill gesture and keep the rest,” the institution has admitted, in writing, that the fee is unjustified and has decided to keep charging it anyway, until the next customer happens to have a daughter with the time to call.
A note on staying in the room.
I argued for Mrs. Flint. I did not win. The fee structure that produced her penalties is still in place at the institution where that meeting happened, and at every other institution like it. I stayed. I am still in rooms like that one. I will be in more of them. I tell myself the staying is worth it because I am there to ask the questions in the previous section to make sure no one in the meeting can later claim they didn’t know. I tell myself that having one person in the room who will not let “the policy applies to everyone equally” go unchallenged is better than having no one. I tell myself that. Mostly I believe it.
But I want to be honest that “I stayed to fight another day” is also the sentence professionals have used, for as long as professionals have existed, to justify staying in rooms where they should have walked out. The line between strategic patience and quiet complicity is not a line I can locate with certainty from inside the room. That is the thing I am still figuring out.
Mrs. Flint got three months reversed. The architecture that charged her for years is still operating.
The question is not whether the bank made it right. The bank did not.
The question is who designed the architecture in the first place and whether the next person asked to design one like it will know how to refuse.
I’d like to hear from other researchers and designers who’ve sat in rooms like this one. What did you ask, what were you told, and what did you do next? Get in touch.
