AFTAs 2019: Best Compliance Initiative—Bank of America

Let’s give it up for EDIE, which was named as the best compliance initiative at the AFTAs. Bank of America’s EDIE, short for Enterprise Data Indexing Engine, uses the power of natural-language processing and machine learning to understand regulatory documentation and requirements. More importantly, it aims to understand document content, rather than just search keywords.

This is important because as the financial services industry continues to advance its technological capabilities, regulatory scrutiny on safeguarding consumer data is following suit, says Howard Boville, CTO at Bank of America. When you consider that there are about 1,200 regulatory bodies around the globe creating new regulations and amending old ones, it’s a challenge to keep up with the pace of change.

EDIE was created in house to help mitigate risk and make the bank more efficient in this ever-changing regulatory environment.

“With human oversight, the solution allows us to align laws, rules and regulations (LRRs) to our policies and standards in a much faster and more consistent manner than manual human review,” Boville says. “Before EDIE, it could take our compliance team one hour to deconstruct a few pages of a regulation and days to fully break down lengthy regulations that could consist of 900-plus pages. Now, in just seconds, we can associate LRR requirements with our policies and standards, as well as our internal processes and supporting controls.”

As an example of how EDIE works, more than 200 LRRs, 290 policies and 89 standards were assessed, resulting in a determination that more than 109 LRRs—with 562 requirements from 41 different issuing authorities across the globe—were potentially applicable. “From this assessment, we were able to strengthen specific elements of our policies. This assessment was completed in less than 3 hours; it would likely have required 11,000-plus man hours to complete manually,” says Boville.