FIS uses Anthropic to develop agent AI for banks, targeting compliance

Written by Aarav Garg

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

Through this partnership, the companies will build a financial crimes AI agent that can collect evidence across banking systems, analyze activity against known AML typologies, and prioritize high-risk alerts to investigators. The solution is expected to reduce investigative timelines from hours to minutes, while improving consistency in case reviews and reducing false positives.

Stephanie Ferris, FIS CEO and Presidentsays, “Every bank in the world wants AI to act, not just help. The future is about a trusted provider that manages data, manages agents, and stands between customers and the AI ​​that makes financial decisions.”

The project reflects broader changes across financial services, as banks seek to apply AI to operational and regulatory functions, not just customer-facing experiments. AML compliance remains one of the most resource-intensive areas for banks around the world, with institutions continuing to rely heavily on fragmented systems and manual evidence collected across payment, deposit, and transaction monitoring platforms.

Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services, Anthropic“FIS brings decades of trusted relationships with financial institutions, deep regulatory knowledge, and transactional data that makes AI agents actionable. That’s why FIS chose Claude. They needed a model that could accurately reason through complex investigations, explain their work, and operate securely within regulated workflows.”

FIS said the platform is being developed within a managed infrastructure environment, customer data remains within FIS-managed systems, and the output generated by the AI ​​is fully traceable and auditable. Anthropic’s Claude model provides inference capabilities, and FIS contributes to bank data infrastructure, compliance systems, and integration layers.

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