Subscriptions and Open Banking

Stakeholders wanted the first one. Legal had raised Consumer Duty when we kicked the project off, so this wasn’t only a tone question. Somebody connecting a bank account to hunt down forgotten charges is trying to get control, not to get more, and an upsell frame around that moment is the kind of thing Consumer Duty exists to catch.

The draft copy said we’d find your subscriptions, full stop, and everyone was comfortable with that because it described the feature. It just described it larger than it was.

A connection has a scope. What surfaces is what bills from the account someone links, and the copy has to say so, or the person fills in the rest themselves. That reads like a small hedge. It isn’t.

Think about what the failure actually looks like. Someone links an account, sees what’s there, cancels a couple, and closes the app believing they have now seen everything charging them every month. Whatever bills from somewhere else is still running, and they have stopped looking, because we told them we looked.

A tool that overstates its own reach is worse than no tool at all, because it replaces vigilance with false confidence. No tool and you stay suspicious. A tool that says “everything” and means “some” buys you a false sense of having handled it, and the bill arrives anyway.

The version that shipped is longer and less confident, and it’s the only one where the person’s mental model matches what the screen actually did. That gap, between what the copy implies and what the system knows, is most of what content design is for in regulated products.

In an app this size, one flow crosses surfaces owned by different teams, and a person doesn’t experience those seams as anybody’s org chart. I lead content across five of them: Settings, Profile, Activity, Subscriptions and Open Banking, and Notifications. If add means one thing on this screen and something else on the next, the seam shows. So I defined the three verbs and wrote them down, and the same word means the same thing wherever someone lands.