AI Privacy for finance & legal

What ships out of the box

Two of the four built-in industry presets in SOWA Privacy cover finance and legal workflows directly. Either preset is one click away in Settings → Detection → PII Presets, and you can compose both at once via Custom rules & lists.

Legal preset – clients / cases / parties

Captures the vocabulary of cases, parties, courts, and instruments. The examples below show common English legal vocabulary; add firm-specific terms via the custom Blacklist.

Finance preset – accounts / transactions / loans

Covers account-level identifiers, banking products, transaction primitives, and the paper trail.

Both presets layer on top of the always-on regex packs – emails, phone numbers, IBAN, BIC/SWIFT, credit card numbers, national tax IDs, and a dozen others.

Why this matters for finance & legal

Attorney-client privilege

Privilege is paper-thin once data crosses an organisational boundary. Pasting privileged correspondence into a public AI tool may not, on its own, waive the privilege under every jurisdiction – but it is almost always treated as a disclosure to a third-party processor, with all the consent and audit obligations that come with it. SOWA flips the default: the AI sees [CLIENT_1] and [CASE_2], not the names and case numbers.

Banking secrecy & MiFID II

Customer financial data is subject to banking secrecy in every EU member state. Names paired with account numbers, transaction history, or product holdings are protected – exactly the data shape SOWA is built to catch. MiFID II's recordkeeping requirements also assume the bank knows where its customer data is going; uncontrolled AI prompts undermine that.

Local detection – zero data egress

Detection runs entirely in the browser. No SOWA server sees your prompt content. The optional NER model is downloaded once from HuggingFace and then runs offline; the optional WebLLM model runs on the local GPU. The only network call SOWA makes (other than the AI vendor you chose) is a sparse entitlement check that contains no PII, no prompts, and no audit data.

Tailor it to your firm or desk

• Add firm-specific identifiers (matter numbers, internal client IDs, deal codes) to the Blacklist in Settings.
• Add safe boilerplate (your firm name, jurisdiction names, public-record reference numbers) to the Whitelist.
• Add custom regex rules for instrument identifiers (e.g. ISINs, CUSIPs, internal reference codes).
• Export the resulting preset as .sowa.json and ship it to every workstation via an IT policy.