FIS & Anthropic launch AI agent for bank crime probes

FIS is working with Anthropic to launch an artificial intelligence agent for banks focused on financial crime investigations. BMO and Amalgamated Bank are among the first institutions helping develop the system.

The product, called the Financial Crimes AI Agent, is designed to cut anti-money laundering alert and case investigations from hours to minutes. It assembles evidence across a bank's systems and evaluates activity against known typologies before an investigator reviews the case.

The move puts FIS more directly into the race among financial technology groups and banks to apply generative AI to heavily regulated workflows. Firms are trying to reduce manual work without weakening compliance controls. Financial crime is one of banks' most expensive areas of operation, with large teams often spending much of their time gathering information from separate systems before analysis can begin.

The agent is being built inside FIS's governed environment, so client data remains within FIS-controlled infrastructure. Each decision made by the system will be traceable and auditable, a point likely to matter for banks facing scrutiny over how AI is used in customer and risk decisions.

Anthropic's Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are working with FIS to design the first product and transfer knowledge, enabling FIS to build additional agents over time. Claude, Anthropic's model family, will provide the system's reasoning layer.

The arrangement shows how AI model developers are increasingly seeking deeper ties with large industry software providers rather than relying only on general-purpose tools. For FIS, the partnership provides access to a model provider while keeping data, governance and deployment within its own environment.

"Every bank in the world wants AI that acts, not just assists. The future is about a trusted provider who manages the data, governs the agents, and stands between your customers and the AI making decisions about their money. FIS built the architecture that orchestrates this intelligence. Anthropic is a leading AI provider, Claude is the reasoning engine inside, and the Financial Crimes AI Agent is the first proof of what this architecture can deliver for financial institutions ready to become the agent-first bank of the future. It's a new era in banking," said Stephanie Ferris, Chief Executive Officer and President of FIS.

Why financial crime

FIS is starting with anti-money laundering because the work is costly, labour-intensive and closely tied to regulatory obligations. According to figures cited by FIS, the UN estimates that USD $2 trillion in illicit funds flows through the global financial system every year, while US financial institutions spend USD $35 billion to USD $40 billion annually on AML operations.

Investigators often have to pull transaction records, customer information, payment activity, and related materials from disconnected systems before deciding whether the activity appears suspicious. FIS says its role as a system of record for transactions, payments, deposits, credit and customer activity gives the new agent direct access to the information needed for those cases.

For banks that do not use FIS for core systems, the agent will connect through open integration standards. In either case, the governance and audit layer will remain within FIS infrastructure.

The tool will be measured on reducing cost per case, cutting manual work and shortening review times. It is also intended to reduce false positives and improve the quality of narratives in suspicious activity reports, though investigators will remain responsible for final decisions.

"FIS brings decades of trusted relationships with financial institutions, deep regulatory knowledge, and the transaction data that makes an AI agent useful in practice. That's why FIS chose Claude. They needed a model that could reason through complex investigations accurately, explain its work, and operate safely inside regulated workflows. We embedded our Applied AI team inside FIS to build the Financial Crimes AI Agent together, so every conclusion the agent reaches links back to its source data, and every decision stays with the investigator," said  Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services, Anthropic.

Broader push

The financial crime product is intended to be the first in a broader set of banking agents. FIS's roadmap includes tools for credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding and fraud prevention, all built on the same platform and using the same model provider.

This suggests FIS is trying to position itself not simply as a software supplier adding AI features, but as a control point for how banks adopt autonomous or semi-autonomous systems in regulated areas. The company already serves thousands of financial institutions, giving it a large installed base if clients want AI systems embedded in operational workflows rather than used as stand-alone assistants.

General availability of the Financial Crimes AI Agent is planned for the second half of 2026, following initial development work with early banking customers. The first use case targets one of the industry's biggest operational burdens: investigators spending days assembling evidence before reaching a judgment on risk.