FIS (NYSE: FIS) announced a partnership with Anthropic to develop an AI agent designed to assist with financial crimes investigations at banks. The Financial Crimes AI Agent aims to reduce the time required for anti-money laundering investigations from hours to minutes.

The agent will automatically gather evidence across a bank's core systems and evaluate activity against known patterns of illicit behavior. BMO and Amalgamated Bank will be among the first institutions to test the technology, with broader availability planned for the second half of 2026.

Anthropic's Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers are working directly with FIS to design the agent. The system uses Anthropic's Claude AI models for reasoning capabilities while operating within FIS-controlled infrastructure to maintain data security and regulatory compliance.

The United Nations estimates that $2 trillion in illicit funds flows through the global financial system annually. U.S. financial institutions spend $35-40 billion yearly on anti-money laundering operations, with investigators spending significant time manually collecting evidence before analysis can begin.

The agent is designed to reduce costs per case by eliminating manual evidence gathering and cutting case review time. Investigators will retain control over all final decisions while the AI handles initial data assembly and analysis.

FIS plans to expand the AI agent platform to other banking functions including credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention. The company serves as the system of record for transactions and customer data across thousands of financial institutions.

The information comes from a company press release statement.