FIS (NYSE: FIS), a global financial technology provider, and Anthropic, an AI safety and research focused company, have announced the expansion of their strategic partnership. This development focuses on integrating sophisticated agentic artificial intelligence into core banking functions, with an initial emphasis on combating financial crimes.
The centerpiece of this extended collaboration is the launch of a specialized Financial Crimes AI Agent.
Powered by Anthropic’s Claude models, the agent is designed to dramatically accelerate anti-money laundering (AML) processes.
Traditionally, these investigations can take hours or even days due to the need for manually gathering evidence from disparate systems.
The new AI tool automates this by compiling comprehensive evidence packages across a bank’s core platforms, assessing transactions against established patterns of illicit activity, and prioritizing only the most suspicious cases for human review.
This addresses a pressing industry challenge.
According to estimates, approximately $2 trillion in illicit funds moves through the global financial system annually, while U.S. institutions alone allocate $35–40 billion each year to AML compliance efforts.
Much of this expenditure involves labor-intensive tasks that yield high rates of false positives.
By compressing investigation timelines to minutes, the agent promises to lower costs, reduce manual workloads, and enable compliance teams to focus expertise on genuine threats such as money laundering linked to drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and other criminal enterprises.
FIS is positioned to deliver this solution, serving as the trusted infrastructure layer that processes a substantial portion of the world’s transactions.
Client data remains securely within FIS-controlled environments throughout, ensuring full traceability, auditability, and regulatory compliance.
Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are working side-by-side with FIS specialists to co-develop the agent, facilitating knowledge transfer that will empower FIS to independently create and scale additional purpose-built agents in the future.
Early adopters include Bank of Montreal (BMO) and Amalgamated Bank, which are already involved in development and testing. Broader availability for FIS clients is scheduled for the second half of 2026.
Beyond financial crimes, the partnership envisions a wider roadmap covering areas like credit decisioning, customer onboarding, fraud prevention, and deposit retention—all operating within a unified, governed AI platform.
Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President of FIS, emphasized the transformative potential: banks worldwide seek AI systems that actively perform tasks rather than merely offering suggestions.
She described FIS as the essential intermediary that safeguards data and orchestrates intelligent agents, positioning institutions to evolve into “agent-first” operations.
Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services at Anthropic, highlighted the complementary strengths of the alliance.
FIS contributes unparalleled regulatory insight, client relationships, and transaction data, while Claude provides advanced reasoning, clear explanations, and safe operation within highly regulated settings.
Every agent conclusion ties directly back to verifiable source information, preserving human oversight for final judgments.
This partnership extension underscores a broader shift toward responsible, enterprise-grade AI deployment in finance.
By combining FIS’s deep domain expertise with Anthropic’s frontier AI capabilities, the collaboration aims to set a new standard for secure, effective, and scalable intelligence in banking. As financial institutions navigate increasing regulatory scrutiny and sophisticated threats, such innovations could prove instrumental in enhancing security while driving operational efficiencies.
