FIS has made its AML Investigations Agent commercially available to any U.S.-based bank, including institutions that are not currently FIS clients. The solution was developed by FIS with support from Anthropic and design partner Amalgamated Bank. FIS announced the product jointly with Anthropic in May 2026.

At Amalgamated Bank, the agent is projected to reduce Level 1 alert review time by more than 90%, Level 2 case investigation time by approximately 98% and suspicious activity report (SAR) narrative preparation time by more than 80%. The estimates are based on Amalgamated’s analysis of its current workflows compared with the agent’s expected capabilities. Level 1 refers to initial alert triage, while Level 2 involves a deeper case review after escalation. SARs, in turn, are the filings banks submit to regulators when transactions appear suspicious.

The agent is built on FIS Trust Assured, the company’s framework for embedding governance, compliance and responsible AI into FIS products. The system is designed to keep analysts responsible for decisions: every output is a recommendation, no case can be closed without explicit analyst confirmation, each statement links to its source record, and every institution’s risk logic, procedures and thresholds remain isolated.

FIS said the AML Investigations Agent is the first solution of its kind from a provider that operates the core banking, payments and data infrastructure used in financial crime investigations. The agent is now being deployed at Amalgamated Bank.

The scale of the compliance challenge is substantial. U.S. financial institutions spend an estimated $35 billion to $40 billion annually on anti-money laundering operations, according to LexisNexis (2023). Analysts spend 40% to 60% of investigation time assembling data before analysis can begin, according to AnChain.AI (2025), while industry false-positive rates, meaning alerts that ultimately prove not to involve suspicious activity, range from 90% to 95%, according to Datos Insights (2023). FIS said the central issue is not a lack of analytical capacity, but the manual evidence assembly that consumes investigators’ time as alert volumes increase.

Based on Amalgamated’s workflow analysis and the agent’s expected capabilities, the projected reductions in review and documentation time would allow investigators to redirect capacity from data gathering toward complex cases requiring greater judgment.

The agent applies customer-specific context to each investigation instead of treating all alerts alike. Before assembling evidence, it maps a customer’s type, historical activity and expected behavior against the alert. This allows the resulting summary to distinguish between activity that may be normal for that customer and activity that may require further review. For example, a seasonal increase in cash deposits differs from deposits deliberately kept just below federal reporting thresholds. Similarly, a routine international transfer differs from an unexplained cross-border wire to a high-risk jurisdiction. The agent identifies these distinctions and explains its rationale to the analyst.

The system links every output to the specific record, document or check image from which it was derived. Every recommendation, the reasoning behind it and the analyst’s final decision are recorded in a complete audit trail. FIS said this is intended to make investigation outcomes explainable and ready for internal audit or regulatory examination.

Institution-specific risk logic, thresholds and investigation procedures remain isolated through the FIS Control Plane, the company’s governance layer for managing agent access, controls and configurations. The agent is designed to augment rather than replace a bank’s existing transaction-monitoring and case-management systems. It natively integrates with FIS Horizon and FIS Systematics, two FIS core banking platforms, while FIS IBS is planned as the next platform on the product roadmap. The announcement did not describe how banks running cores from other providers would connect to the agent; the rollout now underway at Amalgamated Bank and the planned FIS IBS integration are the near-term reference points for the product’s footprint.

“Investigations don’t slow down because analysts lack judgment. They slow down because evidence is scattered across systems and every alert gets treated the same,” said Stan Szwalbenest, Head of Enterprise Fraud and Financial Crimes at FIS. “By bringing together the core, payments and data these investigations rely on, FIS gives analysts a head start while keeping them in control of every decision.”

“AML investigations require comprehensive evidence and experienced judgment. The FIS AML Investigations Agent can reduce time spent gathering information and preparing documentation, allowing investigators to focus on complex cases and critical decisions. Each recommendation has a clear audit trail, while the investigator remains accountable for the final determination. In regulated environments, AI must strengthen human expertise while preserving trust and governance,” said Sean Searby, Chief Information & Operations Officer at Amalgamated Bank.

FIS developed and owns the AML Investigations Agent. The product was built with support from an Anthropic team that worked with FIS product and compliance teams, drawing on FIS’ relationships with financial institutions, regulatory expertise and transaction-data infrastructure. The collaboration also produced evaluation frameworks and engineering practices that FIS plans to use in developing and scaling additional agents on the same governed platform.

The agent runs in FIS’ private cloud and uses Anthropic’s Claude models. The original announcement is available from GlobalFinTechSeries.