How ZyLAB ONE helped a European Bank reduce data collection volumes by 50% 

Background

An international bank with headquarters in the EU, with more than 50.000 employees worldwide, including Asia and North America, was subject to an Anti-Money Laundering law investigation. This led to an increase in regulatory compliance investigation, subsequent internal investigations, and litigation.  

Due to this increase in internal information requests, the European bank had setup an in-house eDiscovery and Investigations team, consisting of 5 members, to service these requests for internal stakeholders, like Legal, HR, Compliance and Corporate Security departments. Most of the information requests are small volume cases pertaining to employee matters, fraud detection and civil litigation, although the team handles large regulatory requests as well. On average, the team facilitates over 50 cases per day for internal stakeholders. 

The team serves as a gatekeeper for email access and other internal repositories in Microsoft Office 365, hosted on Azure. Today the Bank uses the following Office 365 repositories: Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams.  In addition, because of Bank’s international footprint, the team regularly collects data from regions outside of Europe, like Asia and North America, and in foreign languages like Chinese, Japanese, and German.  

The Challenge: fighting over-collection of eDiscovery data 

An existing on-premise solution was a bottleneck in data storage, processing and computing power for peak demand and maintenance. Also, using an on-prem solution at the Bank’s headquarter office prohibited collaboration with their international subsidiaries and stakeholders within the Bank's worldwide subsidiaries.  

Stakeholders tended to over-collect eDiscovery data, for multiple reasons, including risk-aversion, and avoiding having re-identify and recollect data. Another factor driving overcollection was the limited keyword search capability across the Bank's data repositories, which lead to many false-positive results.  

Overcollection of data increased internal costs rapidly, due to the usage of IT resources for manual data collection, but also due to the usage of human resources for reviewing and investigating non-relevant data and false positives.  

Data overcollection also led to longer case handling times, which was problematic especially in regulatory and employee misconduct investigations, where time is of the essence. Furthermore, data overcollection can lead to data sprawl across the organization which is a huge security risk for the company. Lastly, the team needed to be confident that the tooling can handle a variety of languages accurately, especially when it comes to Asian (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) languages. 

The move to a cloud-based eDiscovery solution was necessary to solve these issues, as well as enabling closer collaboration with internal stakeholders and helping them identify relevant data to each specific case. 

The Solution

The Bank evaluated multiple eDiscovery solutions before making the final decision, but chose ZyLAB ONE for its user-friendliness, flexibility to adjust functionality to different use-cases, self-service capabilities, customer support and top-notch security standards.  

A centrally hosted end-to-end eDiscovery platform, ZyLAB ONE, with direct connection to cloud repositories (Microsoft Office 365, including SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive, and Teams) enabled the eDiscovery & Investigations team to collaborate with internal stakeholders from Legal, Compliance, HR and Corporate Security departments across subsidiaries world-wide, without using resources from the IT department. The team developed internal playbooks so stakeholders can self-service data identification & collection, with supervision of the eDiscovery team.  

ZyLAB ONE's direct connection to cloud repositories and advanced search capabilities enabled their team to have a truly unified view, and service all eDiscovery requests. Language support for over 400 languages and reliable machine translation enabled non-native speakers to service Asian languages.  

Furthermore, reduced data sprawl and controlled data access reduced data security risks associated with global investigations and litigation. ZyLAB ONE's End-To-End platform provides all the necessary security certifications, like ISO and SOC II. Security is an on-going responsibility and therefore ZyLAB ONE's security is periodically re-audited by the Bank's Security team.  

The Impact 

Process standardization and specialized best practice sessions for internal stakeholders, which was supported by ZyLAB ONE's customer success team, improved the knowledge level of internal stakeholders.  

Impact realized:  

• Volume of collected data dropped by 50%;
• Total cost of ownership dropped considerably as most of the IT infrastructure cost disappeared;
• Reduced cost for hosting & processing data;
• Reduced human resources (time) spend on review and investigation of data;
• Reduced timelines and improved data security by mitigating the risk of regulatory violation and reputational damage for the bank.  

What's next?

As the Bank’s eDiscovery and Investigations team remains focused on fighting data overcollection, it's currently evaluating ZyLAB's newest product: Live EDA (Early Data Assessment). Live EDA has the potential to improve the Early Case Assessment capabilities by enabling the team, and internal stakeholders, to search and review data across repositories before collection. In an average case, this can drop the data volume and associated time for review by up to 90%.  

Moreover, the team is dedicated to improving the use of ZyLAB ONE by training subject matter experts. Technology Assisted Review and Topic Modelling can further improve the time-to-insights in an investigation. As subject matter experts are practicing self-service eDiscovery, supported by the eDiscovery and Investigations team, the goal is to expand and use the tool in larger cases.