Secure AI for the financial sector

Banks, insurers and asset managers handle customers’ money, account details and sometimes their plans for the future. That is why the demands for confidentiality, control and traceability are higher than in almost any other industry, from customers and supervisors alike.

At the same time, there is a lot of time to gain. Credit instructions, product terms, policies and internal routines are extensive, and they change often. An adviser answering a customer about a term may need to search several documents before the answer is certain. An AI assistant that answers from your own documents can shorten that to seconds. The question is how to do it without anything sensitive leaving the building.

Sensitive data never needs to leave

Many AI services run in an external cloud. Every question, and often excerpts from the documents behind the answer, is sent to another party. For an organisation with confidentiality requirements, that raises hard questions about where the data is, who can see it and how long it is kept.

There is a simpler answer. Let the AI solution run in your own environment. The software, the documents and the language model are then with you, and no question needs to go anywhere else. For the most sensitive environments you can go one step further. The environment can run fully isolated with an air gap. If the environment has no way out, the data cannot get out either. You do not need to trust promises about what happens on the other side, because there is no other side.

Just as important is what happens to what gets typed in. Customer data and internal analysis should not become anyone else’s training data. A secure solution uses your material to answer your questions and nothing else.

Control you can demonstrate

In a regulated business it is not enough to have control. You need to be able to show it. Staff sign in with the account they already have, using SSO and MFA. With RBAC, the role decides what each person can see, so the assistant never answers from material the user is not entitled to. Sensitive changes, such as new roles or altered retention periods, require approval from a second person.

Everything that happens is written to a tamper-evident audit log. Later changes are visible. The log can be connected to the SIEM your security team already uses, so AI support becomes part of normal monitoring.

Sometimes data must be kept longer than usual, ahead of a dispute or a review for example. With legal hold, selected data is exempt from regular deletion until the hold is lifted. Traffic is encrypted with TLS and stored data with AES-256. That is always included.

Answers that stand up to scrutiny

An adviser giving an answer to a customer needs to be able to stand behind it. That is why every answer from the assistant should show which documents it is based on. The adviser can open the term, read the passage and feel certain before replying. If the material is missing, that should be visible.

AI then supports the judgement. Responsibility stays with people, and you can always show what an answer was based on.

How it works in iSearch

The whole chain in iSearch can run in your own environment, fully isolated when required. Every customer gets a separate installation of its own, and customer data and internal documents stay with you.

SSO, MFA, role-based access, the four-eyes principle, a tamper-evident audit log and legal hold are included. Traffic is protected with TLS and stored data with AES-256. Every answer shows which documents were read, and your data is never used to train models.

Read more about security, see how iSearch is used or book a walkthrough.