When Capital One couldn’t find a commercially available tokenization software tool, it tapped its engineering team to build one. The financial firm, which launched its software division in 2022 and deployed data management platform Slingshot the same year, turned to tokenization as a potential security solution two years ago and set about engineering an alternative to traditional encryption. In April, Capital One Software completed the commercial rollout of its second product, Databolt. The platform replaces sensitive data with tokens, preserving the underlying formatting while enabling security third-party sharing and generative AI ingestion. “When you encrypt the data, it changes the format, and you have to decrypt the data every time you run an operation,” Bian said. Tokenization keeps the original format unchanged — a Social Security number remains a nine-digit string — while shielding the sensitive data point. “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.” The software division tapped into its 14,000-plus army of engineering and technology professionals to develop a scalable solution, an initiative that led to the creation of Databolt. In May, the bank integrated Databolt with Snowflake and Databricks to expand the platform’s capabilities and unlock access to larger stores of data for AI and analytics operations in a secure environment.