Unblock production data access at a bank

You are the FDE lead on a 10-week engagement at Harbourline Bank (fictional), a mid-size bank in the UAE. The goal: an assistant that helps anti-money-laundering (AML) analysts triage transaction-monitoring alerts. Today each alert takes an analyst about 35 minutes; 70% are closed as false positives.

The contract has a week-6 milestone: show, on real historical alerts, that the assistant's triage recommendation agrees with the final analyst decision on at least 85% of a 1,000-alert sample, and cuts analyst time by 30% in a timed test. Payment of the second tranche depends on it.

It is week 3. Status:

• Your sponsor is the Head of Financial Crime Compliance, Omar Haddad.
• Information Security (CISO's office, led by Leena Thomas) has refused your team access to production alert data. Their note says: customer data cannot leave the bank's environment, contractor laptops cannot connect to production, and model calls to any service outside the UAE are not allowed under the bank's data-residency policy.
• You have been working on 300 synthetic alerts built by the bank's analysts. They are too clean to prove anything.
• The bank has an on-prem GPU cluster used by its data science team and a UAE-region tenant with a major cloud provider.
• Omar has suggested you "just get the data via his team on an encrypted USB".

Write your email to Leena (cc Omar) and your revised plan.