TD Bank Scales AI to Fix AML Program

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are playing a key role in TD Bank Group’s “No. 1 priority,” its U.S. anti-money laundering (AML) remediation program, an executive said Thursday (Feb. 26) during the bank’s first quarter 2026 earnings call.

TD Bank continued to make progress on this program during the quarter and launched a new know-your-customer (KYC) platform for its business users this month, Leo Salom, group head of U.S. Retail at TD Bank Group and president and CEO of TD Bank, said during the call.

This will provide a centralized platform for collecting and maintaining customer information and will provide better insights about customers to support the bank’s AML program, Salom said.

“In addition, as we’ve spoken about previously, we are continuing to work on additional AI and machine learning capabilities,” Salom said during Thursday’s call. “We implemented machine learning models in our transaction monitoring system last year. Additional models will be deployed in our program over the coming quarters. Finally, we rolled out an enhanced financial crime risk assessment methodology that is data-driven, resulting in a more sophisticated assessment of the bank’s financial crimes risk.”

TD Bank Group and several U.S. regulators and authorities announced in October 2024 that the bank and some of its U.S. subsidiaries consented to orders and entered into plea agreements related to investigations of its U.S. Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and AML programs.

Raymond Chun, group president and CEO at TD Bank Group, said during the call that across its operations, the bank is making progress toward its target of 1 billion Canadian dollars (about $731 million) in value from AI over the medium-term.

TD Bank outlined this goal in a September investor day presentation, saying that it aims to deliver annualized revenue uplift of 500 million Canadian dollars (about $365 million) and annualized cost savings of 500 million Canadian dollars through AI over the middle-term. This program encompasses predictive, generative and agentic AI.

Chun said Thursday that the bank is accelerating its AI deployments and reducing the cost of delivery by scaling the technology through repeatable patterns as part of its AI strategy of “build once and use many times.”

TD Bank introduced a generative AI knowledge management solution in its contact centers last year and has deployed it across its more than 1,000 branches in Canada since then.

“Questions that used to have colleagues jumping through screens are now answered in seconds,” Chun said.

The bank also introduced an agentic AI solution that simplifies the real estate secured lending (RESL) pre-adjudication process.

“This provides the foundation for broader agentic AI adoption across RESL and other businesses,” Chun said.

Kelvin Vi Luan Tran, group head and chief financial officer at TD Bank Group, said during the call that AI is supporting the bank’s effort to achieve annualized costs savings over 2.2 billion to 2.5 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion).

“AI is helping power these savings as we scale through repeatable patterns, driving faster deployment and reduced costs of delivery,” Tran said.