Hey fintech fam 💜

What an absolute whirlwind the last few months have been.

For 17 straight weeks, my team at Fintech Is Femme, alongside our incredible partners, sponsors, and community, built FTW: NYC — the official New York Fintech Week conference — arm in arm.

More than 600 of you bought tickets. More than 500 showed up across three summit days focused on fintech, leadership, AI, and the future of identity and security.

And the outcomes were immediate.

Attendees have already told me the ROI was realized on day one: enterprise deals closed, founders landed their first retainers, bank partnerships moved forward, and entirely new relationships were formed in real time.

It’s barely been a week since we were all together in New York — and now my team is back on the ground, this time reporting live from FIS Emerald in Orlando.

On Monday, I sat down exclusively with Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President of FIS, just ahead of one of the company’s biggest AI announcements to date.

On stage at Emerald, Ferris announced a major partnership between FIS and Anthropic to bring agentic AI into banking infrastructure, beginning with financial crime and anti-money-laundering investigations.

Translation?

The AI conversation inside fintech is moving out of experimentation mode and into operational reality.

This is no longer about chatbots or copilots.

It’s about whether financial institutions can safely deploy AI agents inside the core systems that move money, detect fraud, monitor compliance, and ultimately protect trust at scale.

And FIS — one of the largest infrastructure players in global finance — is building to ensure that answer is yes.

In my latest exclusive conversation with Ferris, we unpacked what this shift actually means for banks, fintech, and the future of financial services infrastructure.

Let’s get into it.

FIS, the financial technology company powering nearly 12% of the global economy, announced on Monday that it is working with Anthropic to bring agentic AI into banking, starting with financial crimes and anti-money-laundering investigations.

And no, this is not another “AI chatbot for banks” announcement.

This is much bigger.

This is FIS making a clear bet that the next era of banking will be agent-first, but only if those agents are governed, auditable, explainable, and built inside infrastructure banks already trust.

That’s the key.

For the last year, everyone in fintech has been talking about agents. Agents that shop. Agents that invest. Agents that move money. Agents that service customers. But banking is not the place where you just plug in a model, move fast, and hope for the best.

This is an industry where a wrong answer can trigger consumer harm, compliance failure, regulatory exposure, fraud, or all of the above.

So it matters that FIS is starting with financial crimes.

The company’s new Financial Crimes AI Agent is designed to compress AML investigations from hours to minutes by automatically assembling evidence across a bank’s core systems, evaluating activity against known typologies, and surfacing the highest-risk cases for human review.

BMO and Amalgamated Bank will be among the first institutions to deploy it, with broader availability planned for the second half of 2026.

That is the headline.

But the more interesting story is underneath it.

When I sat down with Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President of FIS, at Emerald on Monday, she made a point that stayed with me: the hard part is not building an agent.

The hard part is ensuring the agent is within a regulated workflow.

“Building the agent isn’t what takes a long time,” Ferris told me. “What takes a long time is training the agent specifically with the regulatory and compliance capabilities so that it hits the exact answer correctly every single time.”

That, to me, is the whole story.

The model is not the moat.

The regulated infrastructure layer is.

Anthropic brings Claude’s reasoning capabilities. But FIS is positioning itself as the foundation: the data platform, the governance layer, the deployment infrastructure, the client relationship, and the regulatory expertise.

That distinction matters a lot.

Because if you’re a bank, the question is not simply: Which AI model should we use?

The real question is: Who controls the data? Who governs the agent? Who owns the workflow? Who is accountable when the agent recommends action inside a regulated system?

FIS wants to be the answer to that layer.

And Ferris was very direct about why Anthropic came to FIS.

“They came to us because while they can build an agent that changes the systems, that’s not the hard part for them,” she said. “The hard part is, is it compliant? Is it correct every time, with every regulation, with every compliance requirement? Can we audit it? Is it traceable?”

That’s the fintech signal.

AI companies may have the models. But banks need trust, traceability, data access, auditability, and regulatory depth.

And FIS is saying: that’s our lane.

This builds directly on the conversation Ferris and I had earlier this year, after FIS closed its $13.5 billion acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business and launched its agentic commerce offering for banks.

Back then, she talked about the need to keep banks central as AI agents begin transacting on behalf of consumers. If agents are going to shop, buy, book, and move money for us, banks need to know whether the transaction is legitimate.

That’s why the fraud piece matters.

Agentic commerce creates opportunity, but it also creates new risk.

Monday’s announcement answers the other side of that equation: if AI agents are going to operate on behalf of consumers, banks need agentic systems inside the institution too, monitoring, investigating, and protecting the rails.

That is where the industry is heading.

Ferris called it a move from intelligence to “orchestrated intelligence,” and I think that phrase is worth paying attention to.

Because the next race in fintech is not just about who has the smartest model.

It’s about who can orchestrate models, data, governance, and workflows inside systems that already move money at a global scale.

That’s what FIS is trying to claim here.

Not the chatbot layer.

The orchestration layer.

And that is why this partnership with Anthropic is so important. It does not make Anthropic the protagonist of the banking story. It makes Anthropic the reasoning engine inside a broader FIS-controlled architecture.

In other words: frontier AI still needs regulated infrastructure to reach financial services at scale.

That should tell us something.

For years, the fear was that big tech would innovate around banks and core infrastructure providers. But this partnership suggests a different path: the AI companies may need the infrastructure companies just as much as the infrastructure companies need AI.

Or, as Ferris put it to me: “You’re not going to innovate around us. If you’re going to innovate around us, you wouldn’t have Anthropic strategically partnering with us.”

That is CEO-level clarity.

And honestly, that is what makes this announcement interesting.

FIS is not just saying, “We have AI.”

It is saying, “We have the layer where AI becomes bank-grade.”

Financial crimes are the first proof point. Ferris told me the roadmap could extend into card fraud disputes, deposit retention, and other high-cost operational pain points across banking.

The goal is not to build a one-off agent for one bank.

The goal is to build a repeatable agent platform that can scale across FIS’s client base with governance baked in from the start.

That’s the bigger story.

Fintech’s next era will not be defined by who talks loudest about AI.

It will be defined by who can make AI useful, compliant, and trusted enough to run inside the financial system.

And today, FIS made a very clear statement about where it wants to sit in that future.

I’ll have the full deep dive in my Forbes column tomorrow morning at 9AM ET, including more from my exclusive interview with Stephanie Ferris on FIS, Anthropic, financial crimes, and what it takes to lead fintech at this level of velocity.

A perfect song for this era. I’m so proud of us.

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Thanks for spending time with me today.

Love,

Nicole 💜