FIS has announced a partnership with AI company Anthropic to introduce agentic AI into banking, with its Financial Crimes AI Agent serving as the first deployment of the collaboration.
The Financial Crimes AI Agent is designed to dramatically reduce the time required for anti-money-laundering investigations, cutting case review from hours down to minutes. It does this by automatically pulling together a complete evidence package from a bank’s core systems at the point a case is opened, assessing transactional activity against established typologies, and presenting the highest-risk cases to investigators for review. BMO and Amalgamated Bank are among the first financial institutions to begin developing with the agent, with wider availability for FIS clients expected in the second half of 2026.
At the core of the arrangement, FIS is acting as the foundational layer — providing the data platform, governance infrastructure, deployment environment, and existing client relationships — while Anthropic’s Claude models supply the reasoning capabilities. Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are embedded directly within FIS to co-design the Financial Crimes AI Agent, with the intent of also equipping FIS to independently develop and scale further agents over time. All client data will remain within FIS-controlled infrastructure throughout.
The scale of the problem the agent is designed to address is significant. The UN estimates that $2tn in illicit funds moves through the global financial system annually, while US financial institutions alone spend between $35bn and $40bn each year on AML operations. Despite this investment, investigators currently dedicate the majority of their time to manually assembling evidence across fragmented systems before any substantive analysis can begin. Emerging US regulation is also pushing institutions to redirect resources towards the most serious threats. The agent is intended to be evaluated on its ability to cut cost per case, reduce low-value manual workloads, and shorten overall case review times.
FIS positions itself as the system of record for transactions, payments, deposits, credit, and customer activity across thousands of financial institutions, giving the agent direct access to the data investigators need without requiring new integrations or exposure to outside vendors. For institutions operating non-FIS core systems, the agent connects via open integration standards, while the governance, evaluation, and audit layer remains within FIS-controlled infrastructure in all cases, ensuring every conclusion is traceable and every decision is recorded.
Beyond financial crimes, FIS has outlined a broader agent roadmap to be delivered through the same governed platform, with applications spanning credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention — each drawing on FIS’s unified data and regulatory infrastructure and powered by Claude.
FIS CEO and president Stephanie Ferris said, “Every bank in the world wants AI that acts, not just assists. The future is about a trusted provider who manages the data, who governs the agents, and who 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 that are ready to become the agent-first bank of the future. It’s a new era in banking.”
Anthropic head of financial services Jonathan Pelosi said, “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.”
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