Fidelity National Information Services and Anthropic have launched a Financial Crimes AI Agent designed to compress anti-money laundering investigations from hours to minutes. Bank of Montreal and Amalgamated Bank will be the first institutions to deploy the system, with broader availability planned for the second half of 2026, according to Forbes.
FIS, the fintech infrastructure company that processes nearly 12% of the global economy, announced the partnership at its FIS Emerald conference in Orlando on May 5. FIS shares jumped approximately 7% in after-hours trading after The Wall Street Journal reported the deal, according to Technobezz.
How the Agent Works
U.S. financial institutions spend $35 to $40 billion annually on AML compliance, according to Forbes. Investigators spend most of that time manually assembling evidence from disconnected systems before any real analysis begins.
The Financial Crimes AI Agent automates that assembly work. It pulls transaction data, account information, and evidence across a bank’s core systems, evaluates activity against known typologies, and surfaces the highest-risk cases for human review. The BusinessWire announcement states the agent will “compress Anti-Money Laundering alert and case investigations from days to minutes, reduce false positives and enhance investigative and SAR narrative quality.”
Investigators retain final authority over case decisions. “The human element remains intact,” FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris told Forbes. The agent handles evidence gathering while humans keep decision-making authority.
The Partnership Structure
Anthropic embedded its Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers directly within FIS to co-design the tool. The arrangement combines Claude’s reasoning capabilities with FIS’s proprietary banking data and regulatory infrastructure.
“Anthropic came to us because of our scale and the amount of data that we have,” Ferris told Forbes. “Our moat is the 50 years of deep regulatory and compliance experience. If you take a product from us today, you know that it is absolutely built, completely compliant with whatever regulatory compliance you have.”
Jonathan Pelosi, Anthropic’s Head of Financial Services, said in the announcement: “FIS brings decades of trusted relationships with financial institutions, deep regulatory knowledge, and the transaction data that makes an AI agent useful in practice. They needed a model that could reason through complex investigations accurately, explain its work, and operate safely inside regulated workflows.”
Beyond Financial Crimes
FIS plans additional agents for credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention, all delivered through a single governed platform, according to Technobezz.
“The launch of AI agents marks a new era in banking,” Ferris said, adding that financial institutions have an opportunity to become “agent-first.”
The EU is watching the broader implications. Bloomberg reported that European Economy Minister Valdis Dombrovskis confirmed the bloc is in discussions with Anthropic about testing banks for vulnerabilities uncovered by its Mythos AI model. “Indeed there are contacts with Anthropic,” Dombrovskis said after a Eurogroup meeting in Brussels.
The Compliance Layer as Defensible Position
The partnership reveals a structural dynamic in enterprise AI deployment. Anthropic provides the reasoning engine. FIS controls where that reasoning operates: the infrastructure, governance, compliance architecture, and bank relationships required to run AI safely at scale inside regulated systems.
The United Nations estimates $2 trillion in illicit funds flows through the global financial system annually. Banks already spend tens of billions on AML compliance. The bet from both companies is that autonomous agents can compress investigator workloads enough to focus compliance teams on actual crime instead of paperwork, while keeping the governance layer that regulated industries require.