The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | May 8th

By Puja Sharma

The Weekly Wrap is published every Friday and recaps the week’s main stories and deals, as well as upcoming events and announcements for Prime subscribers only.

The Big Story

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.

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.

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.

Deals of the week

• Temenos, FAB partner to modernise Saudi banking infrastructure
• RBI approves Kotak’s 9.99% bet on AU Small Finance Bank
• Payward acquires Reap Technologies Holdings in $600m deal
• Sahi raises $33m Series B to expand technology-led trading platform
• Bison Bank launches stablecoin for cross-border payments
• Axis Bank launches AI-powered compliance solutions for customers
• Sarwa tops $1b in client assets, boosts UAE investing
• A-Cube raises €4m to scale AI-driven tax compliance platform
• Seapoint raises €7.5m seed to expand AI finance platform
• Monzo expands European footprint, opens offices in Spain

Be on the lookout for

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