Silaw

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✺ 48-hour hackathon · Product Designer · VAIC 2026, Hanoi

In banking law, the dangerous answer isn’t the one you can’t find. It’s the one that was right last year.

Context. At VAIC 2026, a 48-hour AI hackathon in Hanoi, SHB brought a problem from its legal team. Branches send in questions, and the laws behind the answers keep changing: a circular gets amended, then partly suspended a few months later. The risk that matters most is answering from a version that is no longer in force: the answer looks right, and someone acts on it.

My role. We were a team of five. The engineers built an engine that tracks each clause’s validity over time; I was the product designer, responsible for everything a legal officer touches: the Q&A, source viewer, change history, impact radar, knowledge base, admin screens and the landing page. We designed around one user, a head-office legal officer we called Lan.

The app screens below are rendered from the team’s code, with the demo’s sample documents.

✺ The answer

Every answer shows its source and its date.

Lan won’t act on an answer she can’t check. So the answer opens with the figure, every claim carries a numbered source, and the date the answer holds for sits right above it.

Silaw Q&A: the answer states the 13% single-customer limit as of a date, with three numbered sources and a review flag on an internal decision — The answer opens with the figure, dated, with three numbered sources. An internal rule that is out of date gets flagged in the same reply.

The as-of date picker open next to the question input — The date picker sits next to the input, so “what applied when this contract was signed?” is one click, not a new search.

Source viewer open on Article 136 of the 2024 Law on Credit Institutions, the cited passage highlighted — Click a source and the clause opens with the quoted passage highlighted, the original PDF one tab away.

✺ One decision, start to finish

Treat “not enough evidence” as an answer.

Problem: An AI that always answers is the wrong tool for this. When the source is missing or expired, a confident answer is worse than none.
What I saw: Most AI products hide their refusals, because an assistant that says “I can’t answer that” looks broken. Legal officers see it differently: “there isn’t enough basis” is a normal answer in their job.
Options: Show a refusal as a short error message, as most chat products do, or give it the same weight as an answer.
Choice and cost: The same weight. A refusal uses the same layout as any reply: what Silaw searched, what it couldn’t find, and how to rephrase. The landing page makes the same promise on its first screen. The cost: in a short demo, an assistant that sometimes says no looks less impressive than one that always answers.
What happened: The team tested Silaw against a plain chatbot on the same documents, with 20 questions. The chatbot answered all four out-of-scope questions anyway; Silaw held back on two. On the sixteen the documents could answer, every Silaw answer cited the version in force, while the chatbot gave no sources at all.

A refusal in Silaw: the reasoning panel shows what was searched, then a plain answer that no basis was found and how to rephrase — Even an off-topic question gets a full reply: what Silaw searched, that nothing matched, and how to ask instead.

✺ Change history

Why is this the current version?

Each clause has a history: issued, amended, partly suspended. The change history lists clauses with their status and draws the selected one as dated milestones, with the text as it stood at each step.

Change history: Article 8 of Circular 39/2016 with three milestones, issued, amended and partly suspended — Article 8 of Circular 39/2016: issued in 2016, amended by Circular 06/2023, then partly suspended by Circular 10/2023 two months later.

✺ Impact radar

The radar finds the gap. A person decides.

When a new circular comes out, the radar checks it against the bank’s internal rules and lists what needs updating, most urgent first. Each finding quotes both texts word for word and names the action; a person reads it and marks it as seen.

Radar report for Circular 10/2023: three issues, urgent first, two already marked as seen — Three issues against Circular 10/2023, urgent first; the ones already seen are ticked.

A radar finding: internal Decision 123/SHB beside Circular 10/2023, with the action to take and a mark-as-seen button — An internal rule still cites a suspended clause: both texts side by side, the action underneath, and a button to mark it as seen.

✺ Behind the answers

A library you can see into.

Answers are only as good as the documents behind them, so the knowledge base shows what is in it, whether each document is in force, how far it has been processed and what it links to. Admins see questions, AI cost and the share of answers with sources on one screen, and set who may do what.

Knowledge base table of laws and internal rules with validity, processing status and links — The knowledge base: laws and internal rules in one table, with validity, processing status and links.

Knowledge base as a graph, Circular 39/2016 selected with its related documents listed — The same library as a map: select Circular 39/2016 to see what amended it and which internal rules rest on it.

Admin overview: questions asked, AI cost, conversations and the share of answers with sources — Admin overview: questions asked, AI cost, and how many answers came with sources.

Permissions: user list with roles and a matrix of what each role can open — Permissions: roles in plain words, and a matrix of what each one can open.

✺ The front door

A landing page that answers before you scroll.

The landing page opens with a real answer instead of an illustration: the single-customer lending limit, dated to the visitor’s own today, with its article and a flag on an internal rule. Cream paper and one orange instead of banking navy, so it feels like asking a colleague.

See the live site ↗

Silaw landing page first screen: the headline Hỏi như hỏi đồng nghiệp, chắc như văn bản gốc, above a sample answer with citations — The landing page’s first screen.