U.S. banks spend $35–40 billion a year on anti-money laundering compliance. Most of that money goes toward gathering evidence, not analyzing it.
FIS, formally Fidelity National Information Services, and Anthropic announced they are co-developing a Financial Crimes AI Agent to change that.
The agent assembles evidence across a bank’s core systems at case open, evaluates activity against known money-laundering typologies, and surfaces the highest-risk cases for investigator review — compressing investigations from hours to minutes, according to FIS.
“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,” said Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President, FIS in the company announcement.
FIS added, BMO and Amalgamated Bank are in early development; general availability is targeted for the second half of 2026.
Research by Alessa highlights the scale of the problem is significant. U.S. financial institutions spend an estimated $35 billion to $40 billion annually on policies, procedures, and technology (AML) operations, yet investigators spend the majority of their time manually assembling evidence from disconnected systems before any analysis can begin.
The 2025 report by Alessa suggests that between 90 and 95 percent of alerts generated by traditional AML systems are false positives. It said the figure underscores how legacy rule-based compliance frameworks are increasingly untenable as transaction volumes and regulatory scrutiny both rise.
FIS hopes to change the trend.
Anthropic’s Applied AI team is embedded with FIS to co-design the agent. Claude handles reasoning; FIS supplies the banking data and regulatory infrastructure. Client data stays within FIS-controlled systems. Every agent decision is auditable. Investigators keep final sign-off. In regulated financial workflows, explainability is a compliance requirement, not a product feature.
FIS says the roadmap extends to credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention — all on the same governed platform.
The push by FIS and Anthropic echoes a broader shift toward automating high-friction compliance work. Fortreum’s acquisition of Kovr.ai and Nexus IT’s purchase of Imagis both signal rising demand for AI-driven tooling in regulated environments.
Image by LEANDRO AGUILAR from Pixabay
