FIS and Anthropic Pair for AI in Banking and AML

FIS, the financial technology heavyweight responsible for powering nearly 12% of the global economy, has announced a strategic collaboration with AI safety and research company Anthropic. 

The partnership aims to integrate agentic AI into the core of banking operations, beginning with a specialised Financial Crimes AI Agent designed to overhaul anti-money-laundering (AML) workflows.

This new agent is engineered to compress the timeline of AML investigations from several hours down to a matter of minutes. 

By automatically assembling evidence across a bank’s core systems and evaluating activity against known typologies, the tool surfaces the highest-risk cases for human review. 

BMO and Amalgamated Bank are set to be among the first institutions to deploy the technology, with a wider roll-out scheduled for the second half of 2026.

Orchestrated intelligence in a regulated era

Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are currently embedded within FIS to co-design the agent. 

This collaboration focuses on a transfer of knowledge that will eventually allow FIS to build and scale additional agents independently.

The strategy combines FIS’ decades of proprietary financial data – representing billions of transactions – with Anthropic’s frontier AI reasoning.

This creates a unified platform where data remains within FIS-controlled infrastructure, ensuring compliance in a highly regulated sector.

Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President at FIS notes: “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.”

The architecture is designed to provide enterprise-scale outcomes by unifying data, infrastructure and governance. As the roadmap evolves, the focus remains on FIS acting as the foundation, providing the deployment infrastructure and the governance layer that keeps client data secure.

Solving the US$2tn problem

The decision to focus on financial crime as the first use case is driven by the sheer scale of the challenge. 

The UN estimates that US$2tn in illicit funds flows through the global financial system annually. 

In the US alone, financial institutions spend between US$35bn and US$40bn each year on AML operations.

Despite this investment, investigators spend the majority of their time on the manual task of gathering evidence across disconnected systems.

Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services at Anthropic, explains that the partnership relies on the marriage of deep data and sophisticated reasoning.

"FIS brings decades of trusted relationships with financial institutions, deep regulatory knowledge, and the transaction data that makes an AI agent useful in practice," he says.

"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.”

A focus on accountability remains, as the Financial Crimes AI Agent ensures that every decision remains with the human investigator while the AI handles the heavy lifting of data collation. 

A roadmap for the agent-first bank

The Financial Crimes AI Agent is only the first proof point in a broader roadmap.

As FIS serves as the system of record for transactions, payments, deposits and credit across thousands of institutions, it can provide the agent with native access to data without the need for new integrations or exposure to outside vendors.

The platform is designed for interoperability – for institutions running non-FIS core systems, the agent connects via open integration standards.

However, the governance and audit layers remain within the FIS environment, ensuring that every conclusion the agent reaches is traceable. 

Following the initial deployment in the financial crime space, FIS plans to release a suite of curated agents on the same platform. 

These will be purpose-built to tackle specific banking pain points, including credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding and fraud prevention. 

Each agent will be powered by Claude and integrated into the single, governed platform that FIS maintains for its global client base.