Security & Compliance
Built for the vendor-risk questionnaire.
Bookend narrows the data-security scope by design: the software runs in your network, no external AI service ever sees a loan document, and the only thing that leaves is a heartbeat you can read on screen. Here is what your third-party risk, model-risk and audit teams will ask, answered.
Status
Where we are
Data handling
Loan data stays in the institution
No subprocessors for loan data
There are none. Documents, extracted terms, findings and the evidence chain live in your database and your document volume.
Outbound calls you can see
jXchange to your core, SMTP to your relay, the metering heartbeat. Each is configured in Settings and can be disabled; air-gapped mode is supported.
The heartbeat, verbatim
install id, version, period, closed-loan count, page count, coarse health and the license key. Published in the questionnaire and shown on the Metering screen before it is sent.
Platform controls
What the software enforces
Identity
Password with Argon2id hashing or email sign-in links; short-lived RS256 access tokens with rotating refresh tokens kept in memory, never in cookies; API keys with scopes for integrations; every sign-in, token and API-key use recorded.
Roles and segregation
Administrator, manager, closing specialist, boarding checker, auditor (read-only). The stager of a boarding or a wire can never be its approver. The platform enforces it; it is not left to procedure.
Secrets at rest
SMTP and core credentials and the signing key are encrypted with a master key you hold. Two database principals: an owner for migrations and a least-privilege account for the application.
Append-only evidence
The application account can insert evidence events but cannot update or delete them. Payloads are hashed in a canonical form and chained; a nightly sweep verifies every loan and alerts on a break.
Row-level audit
Business tables carry a change history through the data access layer; sign-ins, API keys and MCP calls are audited separately. Both are queryable in-product.
Rate limits and headers
Per-principal and per-address limits, login attempt limits, security headers and a content security policy on the UI; forwarded headers honored only from your proxy network.
AI
No frontier models. No external AI.
No frontier model and no external AI service processes your loans, and nothing leaves your network for AI processing. Classification, extraction and execution checks are deterministic rules. The only machine learning is the open-source Tesseract OCR engine, which reads scanned pages on CPU inside the container with its published, pre-trained weights. It does not learn from your documents, and native PDFs never pass through it.
An optional helper can use a large language model to draft a starting extraction template during setup. It is off by default and stays off unless your bank explicitly turns it on with a model you already have, such as one inside your own network. It is never used on loans. Without it, your team teaches forms by hand, which is the standard path.
Model risk
SR 11-7, proportionate to a community bank
The extraction and classification engine is an item in the bank's model inventory. Bookend supplies the validation pack with every release: golden reference packages with their expected results, a documentation page for every rule, and the extraction accuracy report, alongside release notes that record every change. Judgment lives in deterministic, versioned rules whose documentation ships in the product, and every loan is approved by a person.
Confidence gating routes low-confidence numeric and party fields to human review instead of auto-accepting them. The per-bank adaptation for your LAR format happens inside your deployment and never leaves it.
Change control
Signed releases, pulled by you
Releases are bundles: images, checksums, release notes, database migrations (forward-only, preflight-checked) and the validation pack. Your team verifies the signatures and applies the release in your maintenance window; Bookend never updates itself. The migrator refuses to run the application against a schema it does not recognize. Support covers the current and previous minor release.
Runbooks for install, upgrade, backup and restore, and incidents ship with the product, and a diagnostics screen gives support everything it needs without any loan data.
Send us your questionnaire
We answer vendor-risk and model-risk questionnaires in full. Ask for the security overview and the current validation pack.