Client Overview
Our client, a Los Angeles-based international financial services firm specializing in investment banking and consulting, struggled to provide secure exchanges of client presentations. While working on high-stakes deals across international borders, it became critical to implement an automated tool for detecting and removing sensitive information, including the client name, financials, logos, and confidential terms, from presentations. The solution also needed to integrate with Microsoft PowerPoint and ensure complete conformance with data privacy standards without compromising workflow efficiency.
Challenge
Presentations prepared within financial advisory and consulting very often contain highly sensitive data, such as client-specific revenues, proprietary benchmarks, logos, and non-public estimates, which must be anonymized before any kind of external sharing. Manual clean-up would be extremely time-consuming, error-prone, and risky, with potential regulatory violations, data breaches, and delays to deals. The client thus required a solution that would securely handle a variety of content types (text, charts, images, embedded objects) across all the presentations, integrating with existing Microsoft 365 solutions.
Key Objectives
The project was guided by several objectives in an effort to improve data safety and workflow efficiency for global teams:
- Automate the detection and treatment of sensitive data across slides, including text, charts, images, tables, SmartArt, speaker notes, and embedded objects.
- Provide user-friendly screens for the setup, review, execution, and logging of projects to facilitate transparency and auditability.
- Ensure enterprise security by providing role-based access, ensuring compatibility with on-premises systems, and removing all metadata.
About the Project
We developed a custom PowerPoint add-in that used the Microsoft Office JS framework to automate presentation cleanup. This SaaS tool enabled users to scan presentations and internal documents for sensitive information and apply predefined processing methods. Development was completed in three months, and the tool supported both cloud and on-premises environments. Future enhancements, such as AI-powered anomaly detection, were also prepared.
- Region: United States
- Industry: Financial Services, Consulting
- Timeline: 3 months
Solution
Our team performed a full cycle of custom software development, from architecture design to deployment, taking into consideration the specifics of the client's corporate environment. It resulted in an add-in that loaded through the PowerPoint ribbon and side panel to guide users through a four-screen workflow for convenience during the cleaning process.
User’s Workflow
- Project Setup: Users pre-selected treatments for data types, loading defaults from company-wide templates, and overriding them for specific sections or slide categories when needed.
- Backend Analysis. Scan Function: Upon activation, the tool scanned the deck for sensitive content (text, charts, images, tables, notes, embeds, and screenshots), classifying elements and tagging them with confidence scores.
- Review Proposed Treatment: The system displayed detected items with suggested actions, and users confirmed them per element or applied them globally (e.g., “factor all revenues”). The system then filtered results by confidence and managed edge cases, such as inaccessible embeds, through manual flags.
- Generate & Review: The tool created a sanitized copy (preserving the original), removed metadata, and highlighted changes with before-and-after views.
- Change Log: The system generated a summary report (Word/Excel) of actions, including side-by-side slide comparisons for audit trails.
Deployment & Roadmap
- Centrally deployed via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for ease of rollout.
- Version 1 MVP was focused on the core workflow across different data types.
- Subsequent phases: AI enhancements for screenshot analysis and custom algorithms for chart treatments.
Technology Stack
Built on top of a modern technology stack, the custom Office extension provided a stable integration with Microsoft 365 while embracing both cloud and on-premises environments.
- Core Framework: Microsoft Office JavaScript API (TypeScript is preferred) for PowerPoint integration and cross-application compatibility.
- Frontend/UI: React for task panes and interactive screens.
- Backend (Optional for Cloud): Node.js/Express for secure API calls and library syncing.
- Database: PostgreSQL for logging and user configurations.
- Deployment: Microsoft 365 Admin Center; Docker for on-premises setup.
Results
The solution deployed presented real business value with efficient presentation sanitization.
- Efficiency Gains: Sanitization time was reduced from hours to minutes per deck, thus enabling faster client sharing and cutting deal cycle delays by 40%.
- Risk Reduction: Manual errors were eliminated; metadata was 100% removed, and compliant sharing was enabled, with zero incidents in beta testing across 500+ documents.
- Scalability: The on-premises configuration supported enterprise volumes; user feedback indicated 95% satisfaction with confidence scoring and treatment options.
- ROI: The first MVP reached a projected ROI in six months through time savings, estimated at $150K per year for a 50-person team.
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Core Team
- Project Manager: Oversaw timelines and stakeholder alignment.
- Full-Stack Developer: Led Office JS integration and backend logic.
- QA Engineer: Ensured security testing and cross-version compatibility.