08.04.25

Why Capital One’s Software Division Created Its Own Data Security Tool

by: Matt Ashare

Leveraging data at scale without compromising its security becomes a delicate balancing act as financial firms move forward with generative AI adoption. “The workflows are as secure as the people running them, so you have to make sure that every employee knows they have to follow policies for handling data,” said Leon Bian, vice president and head of Databolt product at Capital One Software. “Data analysts, data scientists and data engineers have to follow the right hygiene.” Capital One launched its software division in 2022 and set about engineering an alternative to traditional encryption. Capital One Software's Databolt platform replaces sensitive data with tokens, preserving the underlying formatting while enabling security third-party sharing and generative AI ingestion. “It’s a cleaner, faster and more secure way for data analysts to work with data,” Bian said. “Internally, we don’t feed any sensitive data into a large language model unless it has been tokenized. If there’s any sensitive data that you don’t want the model directly trained on, you tokenize it.”

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