[compliance_tech]

I work in compliance for a major bank. Our process to investigate odd spending/payment patterns could not have been more manual. Essentially, cases alert according to a variety of rules and you investigate accordingly. Everything starts in Excel and you know what to look for based on why the case alerts. I automated everything (analysis) required in Excel using VBA. Did not know any programming prior to this but I did know this was the point of using computers ("bicycle for the mind"). Learning VBA was a little painful but eventually I figured out how to control a web browser with it so I would pull the required documents from the web. From there, I got Excel and Word to talk and auto-generated our summary memos. So, pretty effectively automated myself out of my position. The lesson is, while I thought it was all pretty straight-forward, many of my colleagues found my new work flow challenging to use and were pretty concerned my path would put us out of work eventually, which was only kind of the goal. Have since rewritten everything in Python, which is a comparative joy, and I'm now working on using machine learning, NLP, NLG to replicate some of the same work to be more intelligently automated.