FIS taps Anthropic to develop Agentic AI for banks, targets compliance

By Aarav Garg

FIS has partnered with Anthropic to develop agentic AI capabilities for banks, beginning with a financial crimes solution designed to automate anti-money laundering (AML) investigations and compliance workflows.

The collaboration will see the companies build a Financial Crimes AI Agent that can assemble evidence across banking systems, analyse activity against known AML typologies, and prioritise higher-risk alerts for investigators. The solution is expected to reduce investigation timelines from hours to minutes, while improving consistency in case reviews and lowering false positives.

Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President, FIS, said, “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.”

The project reflects a wider shift across financial services as banks look to apply AI to operational and regulatory functions rather than customer-facing experimentation alone. AML compliance remains one of the most resource-intensive areas for banks globally, with institutions continuing to rely heavily on fragmented systems and manual evidence gathering across payments, deposits and transaction monitoring platforms.

Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services, Anthropic, said, “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.”

FIS said the platform is being developed within a governed infrastructure environment where client data remains inside FIS-controlled systems and AI-generated outputs are fully traceable and auditable. Anthropic’s Claude models will provide reasoning capabilities, while FIS contributes banking data infrastructure, compliance systems and integration layers.

The initiative also signals how FinTech and banking technology providers are repositioning themselves around AI-native infrastructure. Beyond financial crime monitoring, FIS said its broader roadmap includes AI agents for credit decisioning, fraud prevention, customer onboarding and deposit retention, areas where banks are under pressure to improve efficiency while maintaining regulatory oversight.