FIS and Anthropic Collaborate to Enable Agent-First Banks

FIS and Anthropic have developed a Financial Crimes AI Agent and plan to build additional artificial intelligence agents for bank-grade operations.

The companies built the first agent with Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) embedded with FIS, they said in a Monday (May 4) press release.

The Financial Crimes AI Agent accelerates anti-money laundering (AML) investigations and completes them within minutes. It automatically assembles evidence across a bank’s core systems, evaluates activity against known typologies, and surfaces the highest-risk cases so that investigators can review them, according to the release.

This agent will be deployed by BMO and Amalgamated Bank, and it will be made more broadly available in the second half.

Next, with the knowledge gained from the experience of co-developing that agent, FIS will build and scale additional agents independently, using Anthropic’s Claude models and FIS’ unified data and regulatory infrastructure.

The company’s product roadmap includes purpose-built agents for credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding and fraud prevention. FIS will make these agents available to its financial institution clients through one governed platform, per the release.

FIS CEO and President Stephanie Ferris said in the release that the launch of AI agents marks a new era in banking and that financial institutions have an opportunity to become “agent-first.”

“Every bank in the world wants AI that acts, not just assists,” Ferris said. “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.”

Anthropic Head of Financial Services Jonathan Pelosi said in the release: “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.”

PYMNTS reported in November that AI is embedded throughout FIS, improving operations, client service, risk management and product development.

Ferris said at the time during an earnings call, “We anticipated that AI would transform financial services, but the pace and depth of adoption have exceeded our expectations.”