Case Study
Faster insights, zero compromise: UST’s conversational AI solution turns unstructured data into competitive advantage at a fintech giant
OUR CLIENT
This U.S.-based financial services provider offers payment processing for credit, debit, digital, and contactless transactions. The company supports over 1,000 financial institutions and approximately 3.5 million merchant accounts across 100+ industries.
THE CHALLENGE
Unlocking value from unstructured data while strengthening data governance
The customer faced mounting complexity in managing and extracting value from a massive influx of unstructured data—ranging from PDFs and spreadsheets to HTML files and images—generated across its global operations. Key challenges included:
- Inefficient search capabilities—that lacked the precision and contextual understanding required for AI-driven insights, delaying decisions and hindering collaboration
- Limited transparency—with no ability to provide grounded citations in search results, raising audit and compliance concerns
- Legacy system constraints—that couldn’t handle 100,000+ nested files across diverse formats and global locations
- Inconsistent security enforcement—without robust role and region-specific access controls, creating governance gaps
- Third-party data exposure risks—making collaboration with clients and partners a security challenge
These limitations impeded decision-making, hampered cross‑functional collaboration, and exposed the company to potential regulatory vulnerabilities.
THE TRANSFORMATION
From fragmented files to intelligent, secure AI-driven insights
UST implemented a scalable, agentic conversational AI solution utilizing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline and integrating advanced data ingestion, contextual search, and enterprise-grade governance. The solution delivered:
- Automated, intelligent ingestion—with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) triggers, parallel parsing, and multilingual vector embeddings, eliminating manual steps while enforcing role-based access
- Multimodal data processing using pipeline decoupling—enabling the independent processing of different file types and forward-compatibility to integrate optical character recognition (OCR) and other image-based data retrieval technologies in the future
- Sub-second, identity-aware querying—powered by a multi-agent AI architecture orchestrating large language models (LLMs), rerankers, and tools, such as IBM Access Manager, Amazon Bedrock, Cohere Rerank, FastAPI, and LangGraph
- Role-based semantic filtering—ensuring users see only the data they’re authorized to access, supporting compliance and auditability
- Real-time observability—leveraging Amazon Bedrock for performance monitoring to maintain response accuracy and reliability
- Cloud portability and scale—using Kubernetes and Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) microservices and modular infrastructure as code (IaC), enabling rapid regional expansion, new language integration, and seamless deployment to Azure, AWS, or GCP
With this transformation, the financial services firm now has a unified, future-proof platform that supports AI-driven decision-making enterprise-wide.
THE IMPACT
Measurable gains in speed, compliance, and scalability
The agentic conversational AI solution delivered immediate business value to the financial services company with these impressive results:
- 50%+ faster document search—accelerating insights across the enterprise to enhance operations, customer service, product development, fraud detection, and claims management
- Improved regulatory compliance—thanks to built-in role-based access controls that prevent unintentional data exposure and reduce compliance risks
- Higher user satisfaction—with pilot teams reporting greater confidence in contextual answers and query results
- Bulit-in scalability—enabling the company to adapt the solution to accommodate growth and technology advancements with minimal code changes
The company has positioned itself for a sustained competitive advantage by consolidating fragmented, difficult-to-manage, and unstructured data into a cohesive, AI-driven analytics solution with rigorous governance.
Discover how UST’s AI solutions can position your organization for strategic growth and compliance excellence.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/ai-survey