US-based FIS has announced the commercial availability of the FIS AML Investigations Agent, which it first announced jointly with Anthropic in May 2026. As of October 2026, the agent is available to any US-based bank, including institutions that are not existing FIS clients. It is currently being deployed at Amalgamated Bank, which acted as a design partner during development, and is the first product in FIS’s planned roadmap of AI agents for banking.
Targeting manual evidence assembly
The launch addresses the operational cost of AML compliance. Citing LexisNexis data from 2023, FIS states that US financial institutions spend an estimated USD 35 billion to USD 40 billion a year on AML operations. Research from AnChain.AI (2025) indicates that analysts spend 40% to 60% of investigation time assembling data before analysis begins. Datos Insights (2023) puts industry false-positive rates at 90% to 95%. With this in mind, FIS frames the core bottleneck as manual evidence gathering rather than a shortage of analytical capacity.
Amalgamated Bank compared its current investigation workflows against the agent’s expected capabilities. On that basis, the bank projects that the agent will reduce Level 1 alert review time by more than 90%. It also projects reductions of approximately 98% in Level 2 case investigation time and more than 80% in suspicious activity report (SAR) narrative preparation time. Level 1 covers initial alert triage, and Level 2 covers deeper review after escalation. These figures are projections rather than measured results from live deployment.
Customer-specific context
The agent does not process all alerts in the same way. Before assembling evidence, it maps each alert against the customer’s type, historical activity, and expected behaviour, so that the resulting summary reflects what is normal for that customer. FIS gives two examples of the distinctions the agent is designed to draw. The first is between a seasonal rise in cash deposits and deposits deliberately kept below federal reporting thresholds. Furthermore, the second is between a routine international transfer and an unexplained cross-border wire to a high-risk jurisdiction. In each case, the agent explains its rationale to the analyst.
Governance, controls, and integration
The agent is built on FIS Trust Assured, the company’s framework for embedding governance, compliance, and responsible AI across its products. All outputs are recommendations, and no case can be closed without explicit analyst confirmation. Each statement links to its source record, document, or cheque image. Recommendations, the reasoning behind them, and the analyst’s final decision are logged in an audit trail intended to support internal audit and regulatory examination.
Each institution’s risk logic, thresholds, and procedures are kept isolated through the FIS Control Plane, the company’s governance layer for agent access and institution-specific configuration. The agent is designed to work alongside banks’ existing transaction monitoring and case management systems rather than replace them. It integrates natively with the FIS Horizon and FIS Systematics core banking platforms, and FIS IBS is next on the roadmap.
Stan Szwalbenest, Head of Enterprise Fraud and Financial Crimes, FIS, said that investigations are slowed by evidence scattered across systems and by uniform treatment of alerts, not by a lack of analyst judgement. Moreover, Sean Searby, Chief Information & Operations Officer, Amalgamated Bank, noted that investigators remain accountable for final determinations. The official added that AI in regulated environments must preserve trust and governance.
The role of Anthropic
FIS developed and owns the agent. It runs in FIS’s private cloud and uses Anthropic’s Claude models. An Anthropic team worked embedded within FIS’s product and compliance teams. According to FIS, the collaboration also produced evaluation frameworks and engineering practices that it will use to build and scale further agents on the same governed platform. Through the process of offering the agent to banks outside its client base, FIS is extending its financial crime tooling beyond its existing core banking relationships.
