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Every day, millions of Americans perform the same ritual: They encounter a wall of text on a website, scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.” Studies show fewer than 1% of users actually read these terms and conditions. Yet we’re expected to believe this counts as informed consent.
We’ve built our digital banking infrastructure on this convenient fiction that users understand and agree to the terms presented to them. In reality, we’ve created a system of regulatory theater. Banks draft exhaustive disclosures to meet
Consider the consumer with a thirty-year relationship with their bank — someone who has built trust and established a history over the course of decades. Yet when they want to add their bank card to Apple Pay, a routine transaction, they’re still presented with the same scroll-through terms and conditions as a first-time customer. The bank’s decades of transaction data and customer knowledge become irrelevant in the face of one-size-fits-all disclosure requirements.
The problem compounds as banks have expanded their product offerings. A century ago, banking was simple: one account that took money in and distributed money out. Today’s consumers face roughly a thousand times more banking product choices than their predecessors. Each new product, service, or integration adds another layer of terms and conditions — what we might call “terms and conditions debt.”
Like technical debt in software development, this legal debt accumulates over time. Every regulatory change, every lawsuit, every new partnership gets layered into existing agreements. Banks can’t simply rewrite from scratch; they add paragraphs, append clauses and stack disclosures. The result is agreements that can consume over an hour to read and require college-level comprehension.
The consequences extend beyond theory. From unchecked data harvesting to algorithmic profiling and hidden arbitration clauses, the results of blind consent ripple across our financial lives. When customers can’t reasonably be expected to read the terms they’re agreeing to, what we call “consent” becomes little more than a legal shield for institutional overreach.
This creates particular risks in banking, where data becomes increasingly valuable. Financial institutions sit on treasure troves of transaction history, spending patterns and behavioral data. As AI makes this information more actionable, the incentives to monetize customer data will only intensify. Yet customers clicking through agreements have little awareness of how their financial footprint might be packaged, analyzed or sold.
The irony is that banks are often good actors trapped in a bad system. They invest significant resources creating comprehensive agreements that technically meet regulatory standards, yet know full well that customers aren’t reading them. This regulatory theater satisfies compliance requirements while failing at its core purpose: creating meaningful transparency.
And the problem is only getting worse. Modern banking apps integrate multiple financial services — from traditional banking to crypto transactions to peer-to-peer payments. Each integration brings its own terms of service. Download a comprehensive financial app today and you might click through agreements with half a dozen different institutions: your bank, payment processors, cryptocurrency exchanges, and fintech partners. The fiction of informed consent multiplies with each layer.
We don’t operate this way elsewhere. When you buy groceries, you’re not handed a contract detailing supply chain logistics — you get a nutrition label. When you take a cab, you don’t sign a liability waiver — you benefit from standardized safety regulations that protect you by default. Why have we accepted the opposite standard for financial services?
There is a better way. What we need is a regulatory reboot that shifts the burden of clarity away from consumers and places it where it belongs: on system design and oversight.
Instead of burying customers in unreadable legalese, regulators could establish standardized disclosure formats for banking services — a kind of “financial nutrition label” that outlines, in plain language, what’s being collected, how it’s used and what rights you’re giving up. These disclosures could be modular and contextual, surfaced at the point of interaction, not hidden in legal appendices.
Behind the scenes, banks would be subject to rigorous compliance reviews focused on outcomes, not just documentation. Does the system genuinely support customer autonomy? Do users understand what they’re agreeing to? Are their choices meaningful?
This approach would be particularly valuable for integrated financial platforms that combine traditional banking with fintech services. Rather than multiplying consent friction with each new feature, a modern framework could provide seamless experiences while maintaining genuine protection through background regulation.
This isn’t a pipe dream. Companies like Apple have demonstrated that customers willingly share sensitive financial data when the request feels clear, timely and optional. Their privacy pop-ups, which surface the moment a new app requests access, don’t rely on legalese or buried disclosures. Instead, they present a simple choice, in plain language. That single design pattern has done more to build customer trust than thousands of pages of banking compliance documentation.
The current system fails everyone. Banks spend enormous resources on compliance theater while customers remain uninformed about their actual rights and risks. As financial services become more complex and data more valuable, we can’t afford to persist with a system built on the fiction that scrolling equals understanding.