About
What this is
Sly by Design is an independent registry of deceptive design in South African financial products, and a publication of analysis built on it. The registry documents, verbatim and with dated sources, the mechanics written into the published terms of banking, insurance, and rewards products — clauses that gate benefits across products, reprice them against measured behaviour, forfeit accumulated value on exit, or reserve the right to change at discretion. The essays connect those documents into the larger picture they form.
Everything published here follows a stated methodology: archived documents, verbatim quotes, page references, numbered dataset records, and a standing corrections policy. The registry describes what the documents say. It does not speculate about intent, and it does not make legal findings.
Who publishes it
Sly by Design is published by Arnold Petersen, a product designer based in Cape Town with more than two decades of experience designing digital products — much of it inside South African financial services, leading design work on banking, insurance, and rewards experiences at some of the country’s largest institutions. This site exists, in part, because of that career: the mechanics documented here are the kind a designer spends years building before deciding they deserve documenting.
Alongside design, Arnold has produced and published two photography books — one of them co-authored with Dr. Ian Kennedy — under his GeoParallax imprint, the same end-to-end, evidence-first approach that shapes this registry. Sly by Design forms part of a longer-term research programme into deceptive design in the Global South.
The site is self-funded and independent. It carries no advertising, no affiliate links, and no funding from any institution documented in the registry.
Contact
Corrections and right-of-reply requests — from readers, researchers, regulators, or the institutions documented here — go to corrections@slybydesign.com and are handled under the corrections policy in the methodology. Requests for access to specific dataset records cited on this site use the same address.