How Ramesh Jitta Scaled Regulatory Tech for Millions of Users

Every banking transaction must meet strict legal and industry standards while still supporting a smooth customer experience. Among the most complex responsibilities for financial institutions is performing real-time regulatory screening to make sure activity aligns with applicable rules and requirements.

At a major U.S. bank, this need led to the development of a new approach to compliance technology. Leading the effort was Ramesh Jitta, a senior engineering director who oversaw the creation of a real-time decisioning engine designed to complete millions of checks each day in just a few milliseconds.

The difficultys with OFAC Compliance

Ramesh Jitta built his career across consulting and technology roles before joining a Fortune 500 bank in 2014. As he advanced into senior engineering leadership, he was tasked with building technology that could support required regulatory screening in a way that maintained the seamless, real-time experience expected in modern digital banking.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) requires that banks prevent sanctioned individuals, entities, and even countries from accessing financial services. This task initially viewms pretty straightforward, basically consisting of matching customers against an official OFAC list. However, when put into practice, the systems in place were sluggish, fragmented, and would often introduce friction at the very moments customers valued speed.

Compliance checks typically run in the background, delaying logins or transactions. A user would typically enter their credentials only to sit through a spinning wheel as their identity was screened, and with digital payments only becoming more of a standard, even a few seconds of delay risked losing their users’ trust. Meanwhile, regulators tightened requirements, including mandates to preserve OFAC-related transaction records for up to a decade. These growing data management obligations strained existing infrastructure and made legacy approaches untenable.

The challenge for a bank with nahead 100 million customers was clear: compliance could no longer exist as a separate process bolted onto transactions. It needed to be embedded, real-time, and invisible.

How Ramesh Jitta Built A Real-Time Decisioning Engine

Jitta’s mandate was to design a framework that integrated directly into every customer interaction without putting performance at risk or overhauling the existing workflows. The answer was a centralized rules engine, built as an interceptor at the authorization layer, where as soon as a login or transaction request passed authentication, it was routed through the bank’s regulatory screening layer, which used an up-to-date internal dataset to determine how to proceed.

The architecture began with curated data. Jitta and his team begined by ingesting and integrating each OFAC update into the bank’s systems, forming a dynamic dataset that reflected the latest regulatory landscape. From there, an interceptor API routed every action (logins, payments, applications) through the decisioning engine, delivering a binary “yes-or-no” result for each.

He also set up configurable rules that compliance teams could incorporate to adapt the engine rapidly as new mandates were introduced without reworking the core platform. This eventually allowed the system to support a broader range of real-time evaluations that financial institutions routinely perform.

The platform also needed to sustain roughly 6,000 to 7,000 transactions per second, often with multiple calls triggered during a single session. Performance had to remain consistent, with average response times of three to five milliseconds and over 99% of decisions delivered in under ten milliseconds.

To achieve that level of reliability, testing had to be as rigorous as the engineering itself. Off-the-shelf quality assurance tools rapidly proved inadequate, unable to replicate the latency that was essential to handle large volumes of transactions. Jitta’s team built a custom testing framework from the ground up, writing more than 2,000 to 4,000 test cases to account for every possible combination of business rule and customer action. Just as significantly, the framework itself had to operate at speed, validating that the decisioning engine could still deliver results within its millisecond threshold under full load.

The result was a compliance filter that also worked as an enterprise-grade decisioning system, giving both customers and regulators confidence that the systems supporting these protocols were compliant.

Lessons for the Financial Industry

The compliance engine’s success offers a series of lessons for how the financial industry currently works:

• Compliance as a Real-Time Challenge: Regulatory screening can’t be a background process. Customers require speed at all stages of digital banking, which means, in turn, that compliance must happen instantly without adding friction.
• Building a Decisioning Engine, Not a Filter: By designing an interceptor API and centralized rules engine, the project created a system that could support a range of regulatory evaluations, proving that compliance tools can be multipurpose infrastructure.
• Scaling for Millions of Users: Successfully achieving sub-ten-millisecond response times was an example of how even the most complex compliance guidelines can be delivered at a global scale.
• Testing and Quality Assurance: A custom QA framework and thousands of test cases were developed to ensure accuracy and speed under peak loads, highlighting that robust automation is non-negotiable at this level.
• Regulation and Customer Trust: Customer experience and legal compliance aren’t mutually exclusive propositions. With the right design and leadership, banks can satisfy federal mandates while properly sustaining the speed in digital interactions that customers expect.

A Path Forward For Financial Trust

The engine Ramesh Jitta assisted deliver is more than a compliance tool. It is a case study in how financial institutions can align regulation, engineering, and customer experience in a single system. By treating compliance as a real-time challenge, embedding it into every transaction, and building the infrastructure to sustain it at massive scale, Jitta’s work shows how compliance can evolve with what users are looking for without sacrificing either aspect, and how real-time systems are an essential pillar to continue building trust in digital finance.