JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — FIS said it is partnering with Anthropic to introduce agentic artificial intelligence tools for banks, beginning with a Financial Crimes AI Agent designed to significantly reduce the time required for anti-money-laundering investigations, according to the companies.
The companies said the new AI agent is intended to compress investigative work that can take hours into minutes by automatically gathering and analyzing data across a bank’s systems, evaluating activity against known risk patterns, and prioritizing high-risk cases for human review.
BMO and Amalgamated Bank are expected to be among the first institutions to deploy the technology, with broader availability to financial institutions planned in the second half of 2026, according to the companies.
What Initiative Includes
FIS said the initiative combines its financial data infrastructure and regulatory expertise with Anthropic’s AI models, including its Claude reasoning engine, to create a unified platform for banking applications. Anthropic’s engineering teams are working alongside FIS to co-develop the tools and enable the company to scale additional AI agents over time.
“Every bank in the world wants AI that acts, not just assists,” FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris said in a statement, adding the effort reflects a broader shift toward “agent-first” banking.
Anthropic said its models were selected for their ability to handle complex financial investigations while maintaining transparency and operating within regulated environments.
The companies said they began with financial crimes use cases because of the scale and cost of current processes. Global illicit financial flows are estimated at $2 trillion annually, while U.S. institutions spend between $35 billion and $40 billion each year on anti-money-laundering operations, much of it tied to manual data gathering, according to the companies.
Automatically Assembles Evidence
The AI agent is designed to automatically assemble evidence from multiple systems at the start of a case, allowing investigators to focus on higher-risk decisions while maintaining control over final outcomes.
FIS said the financial crimes tool is the first in a broader roadmap of AI agents that could address areas such as credit decisioning, deposit retention, onboarding and fraud prevention, all operating within a single governed platform.
