The Chained Pen Problem

If you want to know what an organisation truly believes about people, look at what it does with small objects.

I have always admired the offering of tea across small and corporate businesses in Turkish culture. The extension of hospitality is critical when building new customer relationships, or managing existing ones.

But other small objects in business haven't faired so well.

There was a period when banks, especially the old-style branch banks, felt it necessary to chain pens to desks. It is a small detail, and that is precisely why it matters. Big statements can be rehearsed; small decisions tend to be honest.

A chained pen is not really about a pen. It is a public announcement of suspicion, delivered in plastic and metal. It tells the customer, quietly but clearly, “We expect you to take this.” Or, more accurately, “We have designed this place on the assumption that you cannot be trusted.”

That is a fascinating thing for a bank to say, given that its entire business model depends on people handing over their money and trusting that it will still exist later.

What the chain is really saying

People respond less to what you claim, and more to what you signal through design.

Banks have always loved the language of trust. Safe. Secure. Dependable. Relationship. Yet a chained pen says the opposite. It turns a customer into a potential petty thief before they have even filled in a form.

This is the behavioural problem. Trust is not a slogan; it is a feeling that forms from tiny cues. A laminated sign, a queue barrier, a locked door, a glass screen, a “Take a number” machine, and a pen on a chain. Each one might be justified on its own. Put together, they create a mood. The mood is, “We are protecting ourselves from you.”

If you are trying to build loyalty, that is not a clever mood to create.

The economics of penny-wise suspicion

When you save a few quid in stationery, you can lose far more in goodwill.

Let’s do the basic arithmetic, even if we do not put numbers on it. A pen is cheap. The cost of a pen is rarely the real cost. The real cost is the message it sends, and the behaviour it triggers.

When you chain the pen, you create friction. Not the useful kind, like a speed bump outside a school. The annoying kind, like a door that sticks. People feel it, even if they do not talk about it. The experience becomes slightly more awkward; you are reminded that the bank expects trouble.

That is a poor trade. You save pens, but you spend trust.

Trust is not a moral position

Most people are not saints or villains; they behave as the environment suggests they should.

The genuinely interesting question is this. Did chained pens reduce theft, or did they increase the sense that theft was normal?

If you walk into a bank and see a pen chained down, you learn something about what other people supposedly do there. You have been handed a social norm: pens go missing, customers nick them, and this happens often enough to justify hardware.

That can subtly drag behaviour in the wrong direction. People copy what seems common. They also take cues about how they are seen. Treat people as untrustworthy, and some will behave that way out of irritation, or because they feel the relationship is already hostile.

Design shapes behaviour. The chain is design.

The strange hierarchy of risk

Organisations often obsess over small losses because small losses are visible and measurable.

Banks have always been serious about managing risk. That is fair enough. The odd thing is what they choose to manage.

A pen walking out the door is a visible loss. You can point at it. You can write a policy. You can buy chains. It feels like control.

But the risk of quiet customer resentment is far larger and far harder to measure. You do not see it in the branch. You only see it later, when the customer does not take your call, does not upgrade, and does not forgive your next mistake.

Most businesses over-control what is easy to count, and under-control what actually matters.

The customer experience version of “We don’t trust you”

People rarely complain about the exact thing that made them feel bad; they just remember the feeling.

If you asked customers why they distrust banks, hardly anyone would say, “Because of the chained pens.” They would say it was the fees, the call centres, the fine print, the sense that nobody takes responsibility.

But these big grievances are reinforced by small humiliations. The chained pen is a tiny moment of being treated like a problem to manage rather than a person to serve.

It is the same reason some people dislike self-checkouts that bark at you, or websites that make you confirm your email three times, or security questions that assume you have memorised the name of a childhood teacher you barely remember. The system is saying, “We expect you to fail.”

The pen is just the physical version.

Why this still matters now

Digital trust is built from the same ingredients, just with fewer objects.

The chained pen is all but gone, but the mindset is alive and well. It shows up as endless verification loops, suspicious defaults, confusing product terms, and interfaces that prioritise compliance over clarity.

Banks are now trying to sell warmth through apps. Friendly notifications. Rounded corners. “Insights.” Yet many still behave like the customer is a liability.

The lesson is simple. If you want to build trust, start by removing the little signals of distrust. Not because people are fragile, but because people are perceptive.

A better question for banks

Instead of asking “How do we stop customers from taking pens?,” ask “What would make customers feel respected?”

Here are a few practical shifts. Design for dignity. Make the process feel straightforward and adult, not policed and infantilising. Replace suspicion with clarity. If something needs explaining, explain it in plain language, upfront.

Make helpful behaviour easy. Give staff permission to solve small problems without escalation. Use security quietly. Protect people without making them feel accused. Good security is often invisible. Trust is built at the surface, not in the brand deck.

The 2026 chained pen and endless “prove it’s you” loop

The chain has moved into the phone, and it now wraps itself around identity rather than stationery.

Today, the modern equivalent is the over-extended security loop. It starts as protection and ends as a ritual: face scan, passcode, app approval, another prompt, then an “unusual activity” warning because you dared to behave like yourself.

This is not a theoretical gripe. Entire markets are moving away from SMS one-time passwords towards app-based approvals and biometrics, partly because SMS is vulnerable to phishing and SIM-swap attacks. Even when the security case is sound, the customer experience often becomes a low-grade labyrinth.

The behavioural problem is simple and the intention is sensible. But the signal can still be, “We don’t quite trust you,” especially when it turns a simple payment into a small obstacle course.

When popular culture quietly digs at the banks

In the cult hit One Battle After Another, Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, keeps running into the same kind of low-level mistrust that most of us now meet in banking apps. He is not treated as a person with context, history, and urgency. He is treated as a case that must be processed, step by step, through a set of identity rituals that consume time and patience. The joke is that the system is meant to keep the wrong people out, yet it mostly succeeds in slowing down the right people; you are not defeated by an enemy, you are delayed by procedure. It is the same modern irritation, just with different props, where proving who you are becomes a tradition that matters more than what you are trying to do.

Codespeak as a tool, then as a habit

The film uses password rituals to show how a system can forget why it exists.

One Battle After Another is rife with codespeak. It is not meant to be understood literally; it is meant to do a job. For revolutionaries at constant risk of discovery, coded call-and-response is a practical way to verify identity fast.

The problem is that, in Bob Ferguson’s world, the tool starts to outgrow its purpose. What begins as protection gradually becomes ceremony, and the ceremony becomes non-negotiable.

The first slip that should have been nothing

Comedy starts when the person who knows you still insists on the script.

Deandra’s call, warning Bob about Lockjaw’s attack, is the first moment Bob forgets a key phrase. It is also the first time the person on the other end refuses to let it slide. That is what makes it telling. Deandra clearly knows who she is speaking to, yet she still polices the ritual.

It reads like a small moment, but it sets the pattern. The network, whether it is still the French 75 or something that has evolved into a new name, has started to treat its protocol as an end in itself. The point is no longer simply to identify a comrade; it is to demonstrate that you can perform membership correctly.

The hotline scene and the absurd question

Security turns into a memory test, and the memory test becomes the point.

Then Bob reaches Comrade Josh, the snide voice on the underground crisis hotline, who becomes his personal bureaucratic nightmare. Bob gets through multiple layers of code and effectively proves he belongs, but he cannot remember the answer to a final question: “What time is it?”

Unlike Deandra, Josh does not already know Bob. Bob’s urgency and distressed, human pleading get him nowhere. Josh mocks him for not studying the revolutionary texts with sufficient devotion and refuses to give him the rendezvous point. A life-threatening situation is blocked, not by enemies, but by process.

This is the gag in its purest form. Bob is not being outsmarted by a villain; he is being worn down by protocol.

When verification becomes virtue signalling

The system starts checking loyalty, not identity.

The coded exchanges are funny for the same reason they are a pointed critique. The subtext is no longer what it claims to be. Deandra’s password request feels ritualistic; Josh’s feels like virtue signalling. Knowing the “correct” answer matters more than ascertaining who Bob really is.

As a result, the network’s security becomes a bloated bureaucracy. Bob only resolves the situation by exploiting the rules until he reaches someone who actually knows him. The final question then lands as the punchline and the correction. It makes fun of the procedure, but it also does what the code was supposed to do in the first place.

The political angle is almost beside the point. The film strips it back to a simpler truth. Coded language loses its effectiveness when it is divorced from its intended purpose.

The bank version is “password archaeology”

Security becomes a test of the past you, rather than protection for the present you.

This is exactly why over-engineered banking security feels so familiar. The 2026 equivalent of the chained pen is the ritual you are forced to perform to prove you are you.

It is not that the bank thinks you are lying. It is that the bank has built a system that behaves as if identity is a recital, not a reality.

Why it damages trust

When honest customers feel suspected, they stop feeling served.

Security should feel like protection. If it feels like suspicion, you have designed it wrong.

That is the Ferguson effect. The comedy is not the threat; it is the ritual. You are not failing because you are unsafe; you are failing because you cannot satisfy a process that has become more important than the outcome.

“In the old days, they chained the pen to the desk because they didn’t trust you. Now they chain your identity to a set of forgotten answers, and they still don’t trust you.”

The simpler design rule

Make the safest path the easiest path and explain the “why” in one clean sentence.

A workable security journey is consistent and minimal. It uses one primary method as standard, then escalates only when risk genuinely changes, such as a new device, a new payee, or an unusual amount. It avoids stacking checks for routine actions, and it drops knowledge-based questions that turn identity into trivia.

If your safety system depends on me remembering fragments of my own history, you are not securing money; you are testing memory. That is not protection; it is bureaucracy with a biometric.

And I am sure many of you have been confronted with other popular design flawed services, such as these:

The sudden account freeze with minimal explanation

Nothing says “relationship banking” like waking up to find you cannot access your own money.

A second modern equivalent is the automated freeze or lock that arrives under the banner of fraud prevention or AML compliance and then offers very little clarity on what happens next. Industry reporting points to rising suspicious activity reporting volumes and stronger interventions that deny access to funds.

In the UK, according to Connaught Law, there are also well-defined legal pathways around “suspicious activity” processes and account freezing orders, which can make the customer experience feel blunt even when the bank is following rules.

The chatbot gatekeeper

The old queue has been replaced by a bot that cannot make exceptions.

Another 2026 version is being pushed into automated support for high-stakes problems, then finding there is no fast route to a competent human. Banks are leaning hard into AI-enabled service and fraud messaging, which can help, but it can also become a wall when the situation is nuanced.

The product friction business

Banks used to chain the pen to the desk; now they chain the customer to a process.

Security is the obvious example, but the bigger pattern is product friction. It is the steady layering of hoops, prompts, add-ons, disclaimers, “helpful” nudges, and sales flows that make the whole experience feel like it was designed by three compliance teams and a revenue committee that never has to use the app.

Here are a few examples.

Credit marketing in a credit-restricted world

If the tap is being tightened centrally, aggressive selling starts to look like theatre rather than service.

Here is where friction stops being accidental and starts feeling engineered. Banks keep running polished credit workflows while policy conditions make approvals harder. That gap, between the marketing promise and the operational reality, creates a particular kind of irritation because it wastes time and then blames the customer for the outcome.

When regulators tighten conditions, banks do not always stop marketing credit. They often do the opposite. They widen the funnel, push pre-approvals, send “you’re eligible” notifications, then reject at the end because policy, caps, or internal appetite has moved. In other words, you are invited to an appointment that was never really available, and you are expected to feel grateful for the invitation.

In some countries, for example, central banks have publicly set out macroprudential tightening moves linked to credit growth, which is exactly the sort of backdrop that makes approvals scarcer in practice. That context matters because it means fewer approvals can be a policy outcome, not a personal failing.

When the funnel is wide, but the exit is narrow, the customer ends up doing unpaid labour for the bank’s sales metrics. That is the modern chained pen: inviting the customer to try, then making the customer feel personally declined by a system that was never really open for business.

Now, to take this one step further, banks have entered into a double-edged sword of hypocrisy, particularly for certain high-purchase transactions by their customers.

The Carbon guilt pop-up

If sustainability becomes a nag in the middle of a purchase, people stop hearing the message and start resenting the messenger.

Guilt prompts. Carbon footprint prompts have entered mainstream banking. Some banks offer carbon footprint tracking based on transaction categories, often as an in-app feature that estimates emissions per transaction and over time. NatWest, for instance, has described an optional tracker built with a third-party provider, and Reuters has noted the feature has existed for years despite periodic online claims about it being new or coercive.

Used well, this can be informative. Used badly, it becomes moral spam. In theory, it is education. In practice, it can feel like a running commentary on people’s choices, delivered at exactly the wrong moment.

The worst version is when you buy an airline ticket, get a nudge about your footprint, and then get nudged again to buy flight insurance for the purchase you have already made. The bank is trying to be your conscience and your salesman in the same breath, and neither role benefits. If the bank wants to influence behaviour, guilt is a clumsy tool. People do not change because they were scolded by their current account.

The Insurance add-on conveyor belt

Selling “protection” is easy when you sell it at the moment people are already anxious, and that is exactly why it is ethically and commercially delicate.

Consumer advice groups have been warning for years that add-on products like travel insurance at the checkout can be poor value, rushed, and hard to compare properly. Ultimately, the problem with insurance add-ons is that they are presented as prudence; but it often behaves like a conversion tactic.

Regulators have also been blunt that add-ons sold at the point of sale can reduce transparency and lead to worse consumer decisions, especially when they appear late in the journey.

The behavioural trick is simple. You have just spent money, you are now imagining something going wrong, and the bank is offering to reduce the discomfort. Whether the cover is actually meaningful is almost secondary to the moment it is sold. If the product is genuinely valuable, it should survive daylight, comparison, and a calm moment. If it needs the emotional fog of checkout, that tells you something.

Overdraft “support” that feels like a trap

When credit is framed as help but priced as stress, customers experience it as judgement with interest.

Overdrafts are a classic example of a product that can be useful but can also turn into a quiet penalty for people with the least margin for error. When banks offer overdraft facilities in fragile situations, including unemployment or unstable income, it can be seen as: we will let you fall slightly behind, then charge you for the privilege.

Credit framed as relief can quickly become a source of shame. It is often presented as support, but it frequently functions as friction. It monetises short-term panic, and it usually arrives wrapped in reassuring language.

This is not a moral point; it is a design point. If the product increases worry, increases checking behaviour, and increases the sense of being behind, it is not support, it is stress with a user interface.

In the UK, the FCA has pushed reforms to simplify overdraft pricing and reduce harm, and it has framed this partly around outcomes for people who repeatedly use overdrafts. Consumer groups have also argued that overdraft charging historically hit vulnerable customers hardest.

The wider point travels well. If a bank wants to be trusted, it should not design “help” in a way that leaves the customer feeling punished for needing it.

The pattern: Friction that serves the bank first

Customers tolerate effort when it prevents harm, but they revolt when effort exists to sell, delay, or deflect.

Chained pens were honest because they were visible. What we have learnt is that today’s friction is quieter, but it is more pervasive. It shows up as security rituals that make normal behaviour feel abnormal, credit journeys that invite you in when the system is predisposed to say no, add-ons that appear at the most emotionally leveraged moment, and values prompts that feel like a lecture delivered by a checkout page.

You can call it risk management. You can call it compliance. The customer calls it a hassle, and they are not wrong.

A simpler rule for 2026

If you want a bank to feel modern and trustworthy, the fix is rarely another feature. It is removal.

One clear path: Keep one strong authentication method and use step-up checks only when risk genuinely changes.

Honest gating: Be upfront when policy conditions make approvals unlikely and stop dressing rationing as personal assessment. If credit is tight, say so early, and do not dress a rejection funnel as an invitation either. The macroprudential narrative is not a secret, so the customer should not be treated as if it is.

No checkout ambushes: Separate insurance from the emotional peak of purchase and present it in plain language with space to compare.

Sustainability without sermons: Keep carbon insights as an opt-in dashboard, not a running commentary on someone’s choices.

Chained pens were never a scandal. They were something worse, a casual admission that mistrust had become normal.

If a bank wants to be trusted, it should first stop behaving like it expects the customer to misbehave. In other words, stop chaining customers to the process. It worked for pens; it is a terrible strategy for trust.

At the end of the day, friction is fine when it prevents harm, but it is toxic when it is used to sell, shame, or silently decline.