Financial technology company FIS has announced a strategic collaboration with AI safety company Anthropic to integrate agentic artificial intelligence into banking operations, commencing with the development of a Financial Crimes AI Agent designed to streamline anti-money laundering (AML) investigations. This agent is projected to reduce investigation times from hours to minutes by automating evidence assembly across a bank’s core systems, evaluating activity against known typologies, and identifying high-risk cases for investigator review.
BMO and Amalgamated Bank are slated to be among the initial institutions to deploy the agent, with wider availability for FIS financial institution clients anticipated in the second half of 2026. Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are embedded with FIS to co-design the Financial Crimes AI Agent and facilitate knowledge transfer, enabling FIS to independently develop and scale additional AI agents in the future.
This initiative is positioned as a response to client needs and market direction, combining FIS’s decades of proprietary financial data, regulatory expertise, and compliance and fraud systems with Anthropic’s frontier AI reasoning. The collaboration aims to create a unified platform underpinning the global financial system.
Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President of FIS, stated, “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.”
Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services at Anthropic, added, “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.”
Under this strategy, FIS acts as the foundational layer, encompassing the data platform, governance, deployment infrastructure, and client relationships. Client data will remain within FIS-controlled infrastructure. Anthropic’s Claude models provide the reasoning capabilities, while FIS’s product and compliance teams will develop additional bank-grade agents. This architecture leverages FIS’s Orchestrated Intelligence to achieve enterprise-scale AI outcomes through unified data, infrastructure, and governance.
The initial focus on financial crimes addresses a significant industry challenge. The United Nations estimates that $2 trillion in illicit funds circulates through the global financial system annually. US financial institutions alone spend $35–40 billion each year on AML operations, with investigators dedicating substantial time to manual evidence gathering across disparate systems. Emerging US regulation is also driving institutions to prioritize high-risk threats.
The Financial Crimes AI Agent aims to alleviate these issues by automatically assembling complete evidence packages from a bank’s core systems and evaluating activity against known typologies. Investigators will retain control over all decisions, dedicating their expertise to the most critical cases. The agent’s performance will be evaluated on its ability to reduce cost per case, minimize low-value manual work, and cut case review times.
FIS, as a system of record for transactions, payments, deposits, credit, and customer activity for thousands of financial institutions, unifies bank data into a single, governed environment. This provides the Financial Crimes AI Agent with native access to necessary data without requiring new integrations for institutions running FIS core systems. For institutions using non-FIS core systems, the agent will connect via open integration standards. Governance, evaluation, and audit layers will remain within FIS-controlled infrastructure, ensuring traceability for every agent conclusion and decision.
Following financial crimes, FIS plans to develop a roadmap of additional curated agents built on the same platform. These future agents, powered by Claude and leveraging FIS’s unified data and regulatory infrastructure, are planned to address pain points in areas such as credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention.
