Protecting Personal Information

We’re pleased to announce that SARA’s now uses Microsoft Azure Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to automatically identify and redact personally identifiable information (PII) across all documents and responses.

What Personal Identifiable Information (PII) Does

Microsoft Azure’s service applies state-of-the-art natural-language models to filter your client data in the SARA App

• Detects 80 + predefined PII categories—names, phone numbers, Medicare numbers, TFNs, credit-card data, health identifiers, etc.

• Outputs a clean, redacted version of the text while preserving conversational context and speaker turns.

• Outputs from SARA containing Personal Identifiable Information are redacted with ***.

Why This Matters for Advice Practices

Generally, SOA’s don’t contain a large amount of Personal Identifiable Information. However, as we are rapidly building our capability to complete a full compliance file review, we need to process a large number of files. It’s those supporting files that contain plenty of PII - ID’s, fact finds, product research - the list goes on.

Personal Identifiable Information is a potent source of regulatory liability, financial loss, and reputational harm for advice firms.

Rising breach volumes and harsher penalty regimes make robust PII controls non-negotiable. By combining Azure’s Conversation PII redaction with SARA’s file-review workflow, licensees can materially lower their exposure while maintaining the evidentiary records needed for advice audits.

How Personal Identifiable Information Works

When you upload an SOA and another supporting documentation to SARA, Microsoft Azure Personal Identifiable Information (PII) automatically identifies and redact personally identifiable information (PII) across all documents and responses.

1. File Import – Drag your SOA and supporting documents into SARA.

2. PII scan – Using Azure PII, SARA scans the files in real time.

3. Redaction – SARA redacts any responses containing PII as an asterisk.

4. Citations - Where you click on a citation from a source file that contains PII, the source data citation is redacted.

All workloads run in the Australia East region in our private Azure container, ensuring data residency and ISO 27001 alignment.

Bottom line

PII is a potent source of regulatory liability, financial loss, and reputational harm for advice firms.

Rising breach volumes and harsher penalty regimes make robust PII controls non-negotiable. By combining Azure’s Conversation PII redaction with SARA’s file-review workflow, licensees can materially lower their exposure while maintaining the evidentiary records needed for advice audits.