FIS announced a partnership with Anthropic to bring agentic artificial intelligence capabilities to banking, beginning with the launch of a Financial Crimes AI Agent designed to automate anti-money laundering investigations.
The companies said the Financial Crimes AI Agent is intended to reduce AML investigations from hours or days to minutes by automatically gathering evidence across banking systems, evaluating suspicious activity against known typologies, and surfacing the highest-risk cases for investigator review.
Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are working directly with FIS to co-design the Financial Crimes AI Agent, combining Claude’s AI reasoning capabilities with FIS’ banking infrastructure, transaction data, and regulatory systems.
BMO and Amalgamated Bank are among the first institutions currently developing deployments of the system, with broader commercial availability planned for the second half of 2026.
FIS said the platform is being built within a governed environment where customer data remains inside FIS-controlled infrastructure and all AI-generated decisions remain traceable and auditable.
The company described the initiative as part of a broader “agent-first” banking strategy focused on deploying purpose-built AI agents across regulated financial workflows. Planned future use cases include credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention.
According to FIS, the platform leverages its role as a system of record for transactions, deposits, credit activity, payments, and customer information across thousands of financial institutions globally.
The company noted that U.S. financial institutions currently spend an estimated $35 billion to $40 billion annually on anti-money laundering operations, with investigators often spending most of their time manually gathering information across disconnected systems.
FIS said the Financial Crimes AI Agent is designed to reduce manual evidence gathering, shorten case review times, lower investigation costs, and allow investigators to focus on higher-risk decisions.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Stephanie Ferris, CEO And President, FIS
“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.”
Jonathan Pelosi, Head Of Financial Services, Anthropic
