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User Persona: The Financial Services Professional

Profile: Banking, lending, insurance, and wealth management — customer correspondence, credit memos, claims notes, policy documents, and regulatory material. Primary Goal: Get the speed of a large model without putting customer data where it doesn't belong.

Your problem isn't writing. It's that almost everything you write about contains someone's name, account number, or date of birth. This guide is about setting Rephlo up so that stays on your machine.

Rephlo is a tool, not a compliance program. It gives you technical controls — local processing, redaction, and routing — that help you work carefully. It does not make you or your firm compliant with any regulation, and nothing here is legal advice. Confirm your setup with whoever owns data policy at your organization before putting real customer data through any AI tool.

Providers​

  • Everyday, non-customer work (internal drafts, general research, formatting): GPT-5.4 or Claude Sonnet 4.6.
  • Customer or account data: a cloud model with redaction on (see below), or an on-device model when you'd rather nothing left the machine at all.
  • Corporate data residency: OpenAI-Compatible pointed at your Azure OpenAI endpoint, so requests stay inside your organization's own tenant and region.

Note: Azure OpenAI connects through the OpenAI-Compatible provider type — choose OpenAI-Compatible, enter your Azure deployment endpoint as the Base URL and your deployment name as the Model Name.

Turn these on first​

Open Settings ▸ Privacy and set up three things before your first real task:

  1. Scrub PII Before Cloud — removes detected personal information from a request before it reaches a cloud provider.
  2. Also detect dates & addresses (on-device AI) — adds the categories that matter most in your work. See the table below for what each layer catches.
  3. Block send if redaction is uncertain — when the detector isn't confident it caught everything, Rephlo holds the request back instead of sending it anyway. For regulated work, this is the setting that turns redaction from "usually" into "or it stops".
Redaction layerCatchesRequires
Pattern matching (always on)Email, phone, SSN, full credit card details (number, expiry, security code)Nothing — no download
On-device AI (opt-in)Name, date of birth, address, and other IDs — driver's licence, passport, state/national ID, tax ID, bank account numbersOne-time ~1.16 GB model download

Bank account numbers, tax IDs, and dates of birth are all in the second layer. If you skip that download, they are not being redacted — and Rephlo will show those categories as unavailable rather than quietly skipping them.

Knowledge Spaces​

  • Space: Product & Policy Terms (rate sheets, policy wordings, product disclosures).
  • Space: Regulatory Guidance (circulars, supervisory letters, internal interpretation memos).
  • Space: Templates & Approved Language (disclosures, adverse-action wording, complaint-response templates).
  • Keep customer-specific material out of shared Spaces. Attach those files to a single conversation instead, where they're redacted on the way out and not retained as an index.

Essential Commands​

  1. "Plain-Language Explainer"

    • Prompt: "Rewrite this clause so a customer with no financial background can understand it. Keep every material condition, fee, and deadline intact. Do not soften obligations or add reassurance that isn't in the text."
    • Usage: Select a policy clause, loan condition, or disclosure paragraph.

  2. "Complaint Response Draft"

    • Prompt: "Draft a response to this customer complaint. Acknowledge the specific issue raised, state what was found, and set out next steps with dates. Neutral and factual — no admission of liability, no speculation about cause."
    • Usage: Select the complaint text after redaction is confirmed on.

  3. "Credit Memo Skeleton"

    • Prompt: "Turn these notes into a structured credit memo: borrower overview, purpose, sources of repayment, key risks, mitigants, and recommendation. Mark anything the notes don't cover as 'not stated' rather than inferring it."
    • Usage: Select raw analyst notes or a call summary.

  4. "Claims Note Summary"

    • Prompt: "Summarize this claim file into: what happened, dates, coverage sections cited, amounts, outstanding items, and next action. Preserve all figures exactly."
    • Usage: Select claim correspondence or an adjuster's notes.

  5. "Regulatory Change Impact"

    • Prompt: "Read this regulatory update and list: what changed, who it applies to, the effective date, and which of our processes it plausibly touches. Separate what the text says from what you're inferring."
    • Usage: Select a circular or guidance note, with the Regulatory Guidance Space attached.

  6. "Figure Check"

    • Prompt: "List every number in this document with its label and unit. Flag any that are internally inconsistent, restated differently elsewhere, or missing a period reference."
    • Usage: Select a draft report before it goes out.

Workflow Example: Answering a Customer Complaint​

  1. Confirm: Check the Privacy tab shows redaction active and the on-device layer downloaded.
  2. Attach: Attach the complaint file to a chat rather than adding it to a Space.
  3. Summarize: Run "Claims Note Summary" to establish the facts and dates.
  4. Draft: Run "Complaint Response Draft".
  5. Reinstate: Put the real names and account numbers back in yourself, in your system of record. Redaction removed them on the way out — the model never had them, so it can't return them.
  6. Review: A human signs off. Always.

Workflow Example: Scanned Documents and Statements​

Much of what arrives is a scan — a signed form, a photographed statement, a faxed claim.

  1. Check the language setting: Settings ▸ Privacy ▸ Scanned document language should match the document, not the app. Reading a Japanese or Korean page with the wrong recognizer produces unusable text.
  2. Attach the scan: Rephlo recognizes the text on your own computer — nothing is uploaded to be read. Long scans are indexed to a 200-page limit and marked Partial OCR.
  3. Redaction applies to images too: if an attached image contains personal information, the image is replaced by its redacted text rather than sent as a picture.
  4. Know the gap: OCR reads text. It cannot catch a face, a signature, or handwriting it fails to read. For a scan where that matters, keep Block send if redaction is uncertain on and Rephlo will hold back what it can't read.

Choosing Where a Request Runs​

What you're working withRecommended setupWhy
Market commentary, internal process draftsAny cloud modelNo customer data involved
Customer correspondence, claim notesCloud model + redaction + block-if-uncertainFull model quality, identifiers stripped locally
Material non-public information, deal filesOn-device model, or Force Local for SensitiveNone of your content leaves the machine
Bulk portfolio data, account numbers at scaleReconsider the toolRedaction is per-request, not a data pipeline

The combination worth knowing​

The setup most people in regulated work end up wanting is redact locally, then use a big cloud model: personal identifiers are removed on your machine, and the rest of the request — which is the part that actually needs a capable model — still goes to one. You get frontier-model quality on the reasoning without handing over the identifiers.

The alternative, running everything on an on-device model, keeps all of your content local but gives you a meaningfully smaller model. See On-Device vs Cloud Models for an honest comparison of what you give up.

Pro Tips for Financial Services​

Redaction is not reversible for you​

Redaction protects the request; it doesn't hand you a mapping back. Work in the pattern above: send redacted, get structure back, reinstate identifiers yourself in your own system.

Never let a model invent a figure or a citation​

Models produce fluent, wrong numbers and confident references to regulations that don't say what's claimed. Treat every figure and every citation as unverified until you've checked it against the source. "Figure Check" helps you find inconsistencies — it does not confirm correctness.

Set history retention deliberately​

Settings ▸ Privacy ▸ History retention offers Forever, 90 days, 30 days, or Immediate. History is a useful record of when work was done — and a copy of your inputs. Pick the option that matches your organization's retention rules rather than leaving the default.

Export excludes your keys​

Export Data produces a ZIP of commands, templates, Spaces, and usage history. API keys and encrypted secrets are deliberately left out, so the export is safe to hand to an auditor or store as a backup.

Next Persona: For Legal & Compliance or return to For Business Professionals.