AI agents have moved past pilot deployments in banking. WorkFusion CEO Adam Famularo told Newsweek on June 18 that the company’s Evan agent screened 80 million entities in a single day for adverse media at a top-10 global bank, and that over 10 of the top 20 banks now run WorkFusion agents in live production.
The Compliance Staffing Problem
The adoption driver is straightforward: banks cannot hire their way out of compliance volume. Famularo told Newsweek that at one top-10 bank, meeting regulatory expectations would have required hiring approximately 1,800 additional workers, then training and retaining them in a role that is notoriously difficult to staff.
“The sheer volume of transactions that are coming through are 10x what they used to be, and it’s growing every single day, every single year,” Famularo told Newsweek. “The amount of alerts that were being created were more than any human can manage.”
Instead of hiring, the bank deployed Evan, WorkFusion’s adverse media screening agent. The 80 million entity screening run is the kind of volume that makes the ROI case self-evident. Famularo said WorkFusion’s agents deliver “anywhere from 50 to 70 percent time savings” and can “fully adjudicate those false positives literally 70 percent of the time.”
WorkFusion, now a UiPath company, has expanded beyond sanctions screening into fraud, investigations, and know-your-customer (KYC) reviews. In those more complex cases, Famularo said the agent’s role shifts from autonomous adjudication to reducing complexity for human analysts: “What we’re trying to do [in those cases] is remove a lot of the complexity so that it can make it easier for those fraud people to be able to do their work faster.”
Genpact’s Process Knowledge Bet
Separately, Genpact is making a different agent play. The company, which built its business doing finance, procurement, supply chain, insurance, and risk operations (first inside General Electric, then independently), is positioning its 30-year operational history as the differentiator in a crowded agentic AI market.
“You hear a lot of noise in the market. Everybody is agentic,” Genpact CEO Balkrishan “BK” Kalra told Newsweek. Genpact’s argument is that the real difference shows up in the last mile of enterprise operations, where exceptions, handoffs, and judgment calls do not fit neatly inside standard software.
An HFS Research report produced in partnership with Genpact surveyed 2,002 enterprise executives and found that 85% believe technology, data, process, and talent “debt” limits AI value realization. Only 6% were classified as proven debt remediators.
Genpact’s global agentic AI officer Vijay Vijayasankar reinforced the point: “Those models are super important, but the model by itself very rarely helps in an enterprise context,” he told Newsweek.
Elena Christopher, VP of strategic programs in Genpact’s chief growth office, described the risk of deploying agents into unprepared workflows: “They’re doing perhaps the wrong steps faster with nobody watching.”
Why Banking Goes First
Financial crime compliance became an early agent proof point because it shares three characteristics with the work agents handle best: high volume, existing analyst processes with clear decision logic, and outcomes that banks can compare against human performance. The audit trail matters too. Regulators require banks to explain why they blocked or approved transactions, and agents that document their reasoning provide that trail automatically.
Famularo said the hiring story is more nuanced than simple replacement. “I haven’t seen many people go away,” he told Newsweek. Fewer analysts are needed for basic level-one screening, but more have moved into level-two screening, higher-complexity work, or other parts of the bank.
The cultural dimension is worth noting. WorkFusion gave its agents names, faces, and identities. Famularo said the most successful deployments happened when banks treated agents as workforce members rather than software tools.