EY streamlines regulatory and compliance reporting with Elastic

Unlock value from unstructured financial data

Financial institutions face immense pressure to access trusted information quickly to comply with evolving regulations. However, vast quantities of unstructured data — such as PDFs and documents with complex tables — pose significant challenges. Ernst & Young (EY), a global leader in professional services, recognized the need for an advanced, scalable solution to extract insights efficiently while ensuring compliance and mitigating risks.

EY sought to help banks streamline reporting on their ESG commitments, including internal metrics and details from the full value chain. To do that, EY turned to generative AI (GenAI).

Vishaal Venkatesh, GenAI manager at EY, says, "Our primary focus is to champion responsible AI and deliver these solutions effectively to our clients. We ensure they not only understand the technology but also possess the proper framework to implement it successfully."

Uncovering faster, smarter, and scalable AI-powered insights

By integrating Elastic's Search AI Platform into its generative AI stack, EY revolutionized its approach to unstructured data analysis. EY’s solution significantly improved data processing speed and accuracy, delivering results three times faster than traditional methods and achieving up to 15% accuracy gains across document extraction techniques.

This transformation allowed EY to streamline environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting, get valuable information from complex financial reports, and scale its solution seamlessly across multiple business units. The adoption of the Search AI Platform enabled EY to unlock faster insights while promoting responsible AI practices and ensure regulatory adherence while mitigating internal risks.

For financial reports, EY's AI solution, powered by Elastic, can extract data and insights from complex documents with numerous tables. "Imagine extracting 14 key variables from a 40-page PDF or comparing information across multiple reports from different years. This is where we save clients significant time and resources," says Venkatesh.

Using Search AI to streamline regulatory and compliance processes

Elastic’s Search AI Platform provided the backbone for EY’s generative AI solution. The platform’s machine learning models and vector database capabilities allowed EY to build a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system, reducing processing times and improving information accuracy by enriching its large language model (LLM) with proprietary data.

"Elastic's cutting-edge work in search and retrieval attracted us," says Venkatesh. "We integrated these capabilities into our AI stack for RAG, which improves accuracy and accelerates retrieval of insights from unstructured data."

Elastic’s enhanced indexing and chunking features facilitated seamless integration with other AI tools like LlamaIndex, LangChain, and LanceDB, creating a powerful generative AI stack. These capabilities allowed EY to process diverse document formats efficiently and get critical insights, such as key variables from multiyear financial reports or ESG metrics from complex datasets.

Included observability and security functionalities ensured smooth operations across EY’s custom AI pipeline, enabling EY to focus on delivering value to its clients without the need for extensive in-house infrastructure development.

"With Elastic, we can simultaneously promote responsible AI and innovation. It means our clients can adhere to regulations, act faster, and mitigate internal risks."

— Vishaal Venkatesh, GenAI Manager at EY

Elastic’s Search AI Platform enables EY to deliver innovative generative AI solutions at scale, transforming unstructured data into actionable insights. Some reasons EY picked Elastic's Search AI Platform were because of its:

• Scalability to handle large volumes of diverse documents
• Seamless integration with leading AI tools and frameworks
• Enhanced processing speed, delivering results faster than native RAG approaches
• Comprehensive observability and security features, ensuring optimal performance and compliance

With Elastic’s robust and trusted infrastructure, EY accelerated its development process and achieved rapid prototyping, keeping the company at the forefront of the generative AI revolution. EY has been able to provide financial clients with responsible AI tools that unlock value, drive innovation, and mitigate risk.

"Working with the Elastic team has been fantastic. They help ensure that we're constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible and responsible with generative AI."

— Vishaal Venkatesh, GenAI Manager, EY