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Compress a 60-page regulator PDF into a 1-page brief

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Compress a 60-page regulator PDF into a 1-page brief

A new ECB / BoG / EBA paper lands in your inbox. It is 60 pages, half of it is boilerplate, the deadline is Friday. Claude reads it and writes a one-pager — what changed, who's affected, what we need to do, by when — that you can take to your team lead. Audience: beginner · ~25 min · 7 steps

You'll end up with

A one-page markdown brief with four labelled sections — What changed · Who's affected · What we need to do · By when — plus a links list back to the source pages for verification.

Before you start, you need
  • Nothing — Claude will invent a realistic ~10-page synthetic regulator paper for you to practise on. (Once you trust the loop, swap in any public PDF from the ECB/BoG/EBA website.)
  • Claude Code installed and a terminal open (see Day 1)

Regulatory papers are written in a style that protects the regulator from misinterpretation. That makes them precise but unreadable in a single sitting. The team lead asks “is there anything in this we need to act on?” and the honest answer is “give me three hours and I’ll tell you” — but the meeting is in twenty minutes.

This use case is the twenty-minute version. The point isn’t to replace the careful read — it’s to know whether the careful read needs to happen by Friday or by next month.

Compliance check before you start. Public regulator papers (anything published on ECB / BoG / EBA websites) are fine to put in a Claude-readable folder. Internal interpretations, legal memos analysing the paper, or counsel correspondence are not — keep those out of the folder for this use case.

Step 01

Build the workspace

Open the .

Press ⌘+Space, type “Terminal”, and press Enter.

Open the Start menu (press the Windows key), type “Ubuntu”, and press Enter. If you don’t see Ubuntu listed, install WSL first.

In Ubuntu, ~/Desktop is a folder inside ’s Linux home (/home/<your-Linux-username>/Desktop) — not the Windows desktop you see in File Explorer at C:\Users\...\Desktop. That’s fine: the files are real and Claude can read and write them. Anywhere this use case says “open in Finder / File Explorer”, run explorer.exe . from your Ubuntu terminal — Windows opens that exact WSL folder in Explorer.

Type each line:

mkdir -p ~/Desktop/claude-lab/reg-brief-eba
cd ~/Desktop/claude-lab/reg-brief-eba
claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
  • mkdir -p ~/Desktop/claude-lab/reg-brief-eba — make a folder inside claude-lab on your Desktop (-p creates claude-lab too if it’s not there yet — it’s the one home for all hub use cases).
  • cd ~/Desktop/claude-lab/reg-brief-eba — move into it.
  • claude --dangerously-skip-permissions — start here. The flag stops Claude you for permission on every file write — safe in a fresh, dedicated folder like this one. (If you’d rather see every prompt for your first run, just type claude — same thing, more interruptions.)
Step 02

Ask Claude to invent a realistic regulator paper

You don’t have a real ECB or EBA paper to hand and you don’t need one. Tell Claude:

Create a file called source.md in this folder. Write a realistic synthetic regulator consultation paper — long enough to feel like the real thing, but what matters is the structure and the planted substance below, not the word count. Topic: “Consultation Paper EBA/CP/2026/04 — Strengthening underwriting standards for residential mortgages in the Single Market”.

Structure with numbered sections — use §1, §2, §3, §4, §5, §6, §7 and subsections like §4.2.1:

  • §1 Executive summary
  • §2 Background and legal basis (reference the Mortgage Credit Directive 2014/17/EU)
  • §3 Scope (which institutions; which products)
  • §4 Proposed requirements — split into §4.1 LTV caps, §4.2 LTI / DSTI thresholds, §4.3 stress-testing of borrower affordability, §4.4 documentation standards
  • §5 Implementation timeline (with concrete transition dates: consultation closes 2026-08-31; final guidelines published Q4 2026; supervisory expectation effective 2027-07-01)
  • §6 Impact assessment (a short qualitative section)
  • §7 Questions for respondents (10 numbered questions)

Tone: dense regulatory English with hedges (“institutions should ensure”, “competent authorities may”). Sprinkle some genuine substance worth flagging — e.g. a hard 90% LTV cap for first-time buyers in §4.1.2, a new requirement to income stress at +200bp in §4.3, and a controversial provision in §4.2.3 that allows a 10% portfolio-level exception for “social housing programmes”.

Add a short title page and a footer like “EBA/CP/2026/04 — page X of 10” so it reads like a real consultation.

Claude writes the file straight away.

Renaming to source.md is the small trick — every regulator paper you brief uses the same filename, so the in Step 4 is identical every time. Change one file, reuse the same prompt.

Step 03

Let Claude create the context file

You don’t need to know how to make a file. Tell Claude:

Create a file called context.md in this folder. Put these 5 lines inside it (with my values):

Reader: a compliance officer at NBG (retail bank, Greece)
Bank's main exposures relevant here: residential mortgage portfolio, SME unsecured lending, contact-centre operations
Reader's seniority: knows the regulatory landscape, doesn't have three hours to read 60 pages today
Goal: a one-pager I can take to the head of compliance tomorrow morning
Tone: plainspoken, no hedging, no "it depends" without naming the things it depends on

Claude writes the file straight away. Two minutes — this is what makes the brief sound like it was written by you, not by a generic summariser.

Step 04

Ask Claude for the brief

Send this to Claude:

Read source.md and context.md.

Produce brief.md — a single page with these four sections, exactly in this order, each labelled:

1. What changed — 3–5 bullets. The substantive changes only. Skip “this paper consolidates earlier guidance” boilerplate. For each bullet, in parentheses cite the section number from source.md (e.g. “§3.2.1”).

2. Who’s affected — which parts of the bank, in plain English. Tie this to the exposures named in context.md.

3. What we need to do — concrete actions. If you can’t name a concrete action, write “needs legal interpretation” — don’t pad.

4. By when — deadlines explicitly named in the paper. If no deadline is stated, write “no deadline stated” — do not invent one.

At the bottom, an “Open questions for legal” list — anything you read where the application to NBG specifically is genuinely ambiguous.

Hard rule: every claim in the brief must be traceable to a section of source.md. If you find yourself writing something that isn’t, delete it.

Press Enter. Larger papers take 1–3 minutes.

Step 05

Verification pass — pick three claims at random

Ask Claude to show you what it wrote:

Show me brief.md.

Pick three bullets at random. For each one:

  1. Note the section number Claude cited.
  2. Open source.md (it’s in your ~/Desktop/claude-lab/reg-brief-eba/ folder — open it in your text editor or just ask Claude “show me §4.1 of source.”), jump to that section.
  3. Confirm the bullet accurately reflects what’s there.

If two of three pass, you have a solid brief. If one fails, ask Claude to recheck — naming the bullet that was wrong is enough:

The “Who’s affected” bullet about SME unsecured lending — recheck against §4.1 of source.md. I don’t see that there.

Iterate until your spot-checks pass.

Then make Claude audit the whole brief, not just your three

Your three random checks calibrate trust; Claude can do the full sweep. Paste:

Audit your own brief. For every bullet in brief.md, quote the exact sentence(s) from source.md at the cited section that support it, and mark the bullet ✓ or ✗. A bullet with no supporting sentence is ✗ — fix it or delete it, then re-run the audit until everything is ✓. Show me the full audit table.

This inverts the usual dynamic: instead of you searching the paper to verify the summary, the summary has to come with its evidence attached. Any bullet that can’t produce a quote was never trustworthy enough to put in front of the head of compliance.

Step 06

Take it to the team lead

In real life you’d send brief.md (or paste it into Teams — renders natively) with one line: “My 25-min read of the EBA paper — flagging the SME-lending change as the one that probably needs a real review this week.” We’re pretending here — the file on your Desktop is the deliverable.

You’ve shifted from “I’ll read it and get back to you” to “here’s the picture, here’s the priority”. That’s the work the team lead actually wanted.

The full careful read still happens — but now it happens against a hypothesis instead of from a blank page.

Make the next brief faster with CLAUDE.md

The reader profile, NBG’s main exposures, the tone — none of that changes between regulator papers. The paper itself does. Rename context.md to CLAUDE.md:

mv context.md CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md is the magic filename reads automatically every time you start claude in a folder containing it. Next paper: copy CLAUDE.md into a new folder alongside the new source.md, run claude --dangerously-skip-permissions, and your shrinks to a one-liner:

Produce brief.md from source.md in the format you already know.

Claude already loaded your reader profile and the four-section template from CLAUDE.md. You just point at the new paper and get the brief.

Step 07

Level up — put the deadlines on a timeline

“By when” as bullets is correct; “by when” as a picture is what gets a budget approved. One :

Read brief.md and source.md. Build a single self-contained file deadlines.html that I can open by double-clicking — no server, no internet, no external libraries. A horizontal timeline from today to the last date in the paper, with a dot for every deadline (consultation close, publication, effective dates, transition windows). Clicking a dot shows what’s due, who in the bank it touches, and the §-citation. Mark today with a vertical line. Accent colour #007a8a.

Double-click it before the team meeting and screen-share. The gap between “consultation closes in August” and “supervisory expectation effective July 2027” stops being prose and becomes distance on a line — which is how everyone suddenly agrees on what’s urgent.

The pattern to remember — any output Claude can produce as text, it can also produce as a small interactive page. The upgrade prompt is always the same shape: “turn this into a single self-contained interactive HTML file I can open by double-clicking.” It works on every use case in this hub.

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Compress a 15-page SME credit memo into a 3-bullet summary

A relationship manager hands you a fifteen-page credit memo and the committee meets in an hour. Claude reads it and produces a three-bullet exec summary plus a risk-flag list — the structured starting point your senior credit officer actually wants, not a paraphrase of the whole memo.

Open it → Back to all 15 use cases