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Governance · jurisdictions, decision trail and legal holds

The Governance screen holds the three pieces that let the financial services vertical survive an audit: the jurisdiction catalog you edit yourself, the immutable trail of regulated decisions with an integrity check, and the legal holds that block deleting a subject under investigation.

In a regulated institution, the question that hurts is not what you decided, it is how you prove what you decided, when you decided it and why. The Governance screen exists for that question. It sits in the Financial Services menu and only appears with the vertical enabled in Settings, Verticals.

Jurisdictions: the catalog is yours

The first block is Jurisdictions. The first time you open the screen, three already exist: Brazil, European Union and United States. They are neither fixed nor sacred. Use the Code, Name and Region fields and click Save to create or edit one, and use Remove to drop one you do not need. The screen spells out why: jurisdictions are editable by you, with no code involved, and they segregate products, fields, policies and retention.

  1. Open Governance in the Financial Services menu.
  2. In the Jurisdictions block, click Add.
  3. Enter the Code, for example CL, the Name, for example Chile, and the Region.
  4. Click Save. The jurisdiction becomes available to parties, cases and decisions.

The trail of regulated decisions

The second block is the Decision trail. It automatically receives the decisions made on the vertical's other screens: approving or rejecting an onboarding case, accepting or rejecting an offer, approving or declining an application. Each row shows the Type, the Outcome, the Reasons and the When.

Decision types are KYC, AML, Credit, Suitability, Authority and Sanction. Each record is written once and never changes: no editing, no deleting, and each row is chained to the one before it. Altering anything in the middle would break the chain.

That is what the Verify integrity button is for. Click it and the system walks the whole chain, answering Trail intact or Trail tampered. Running that check before an audit, or now and then, is cheap and worth a great deal on the day someone asks.

💡 The screen says it, and it bears repeating: artificial intelligence decides nothing here. It can summarize and suggest elsewhere in the system, but a regulated decision is sealed by a person on your team, and it is that person's name that goes on the record.

The third block is Legal hold. It settles the conflict between the right to erase data and the duty to preserve evidence. While a hold is active on a subject, that subject cannot be deleted or purged from the system, and the attempt is refused.

  1. In the Legal hold block, enter the Subject type and the Subject ID.
  2. Write the Reason, which is what will explain the hold later on.
  3. Pick the jurisdiction where it makes sense and click Place hold.
  4. The hold now shows as Active in the list.
  5. Once it is no longer needed, click Release. The status turns to Released.

Releasing erases nothing. The screen is explicit: releasing preserves the evidence. All that changes is that deletion is allowed again from then on.

On the Parties screen, a party under a hold shows the Under legal hold warning in the compliance summary, so the team finds out about the block before trying to delete, not after.

Example: The institution receives an order to preserve everything about the company Rio Verde Trading. The compliance officer opens Governance, places a hold on the party with the reason Court order 4412/2026 and the jurisdiction BR. Two weeks later an analyst tries to delete the party during a database cleanup and the system refuses. The evidence survives the housekeeping, which is exactly the point.

Sensitive data and who sees what

Sensitive data is masked on screen: a document or card number is never shown in full. Access to the screens is still governed by each user's profile, and one organization's data is never visible to another. Cost and margin figures, where they exist elsewhere in the system, only appear to whoever holds the specific permission for sensitive financial data.

Frequently asked questions

  • Can I correct a recorded decision that has the wrong reason? Editing is not possible. Record the correct decision, which becomes the most recent one, and the wrong one stays visible with its own date, as an honest trail requires.
  • Verify integrity came back with Trail tampered. What do I do? Treat it as a security incident: the chain only breaks if someone touched the storage from outside the system. Escalate to your technical lead and preserve everything.
  • I removed a jurisdiction that was in use. Old decisions stay on the record with the code they carried at the moment they were made.
  • Who can place a legal hold? Anyone whose user profile grants access to the Governance screen. The action is recorded with author and date.
  • Does the trail grow forever? Yes, by its very nature. It is the historical record, and that is what makes it useful in an audit.

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Governance · jurisdictions, decision trail and legal holds · Sellio