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FIS Inc. is counting on its tie-in with the AI developer Anthropic to pay dividends across several fields, starting with the battle against fraud, the company said early Friday. “The first target is financial crime,” said FIS chief executive Stephanie Ferris early Friday. “The [AI] agent will reduce investigation time from days to minutes.”
FIS’s deal with Anthropic, announced May 4, will leave the Jacksonville, Fla.-based processor with ownership of the model’s agents and technical infrastructure, with Anthropic providing what is known as the underlying large-language model, Ferris said during a conference call with equity analysts. “We’ll own it and we’ll distribute it,” Ferris said. FIS provides payments and other services to more than 20,000 clients, many of them financial institutions around the world. Ferris did not discuss financial terms of the linkup.
FIS has combined its own engineers with those from Anthropic to work on the project, Ferris said, stressing the importance of coding for compliance in the development of financial-crime agents. The company is targeting “the back half of 2026” for the agents’ introduction, she said. “This is a complicated market. Everything has to be tested,” she noted. That includes the model’s pricing. “We’d expect revenue to take shape in 2027,” Ferris said, adding that demand from banking clients “is very strong.”
Speed to market will be crucial, Ferris said. “Banks are looking for us the develop the agents and deploy them for them,” she noted. “I don’t see a view where banks would own their agents at all. They’re very happy to leverage our agents. It’s faster for them.” San Francisco-based Anthropic launched its Claude AI technology in March 2023, with several succeeding models introduced since then. In the deal with FIS, Anthropic will be paid on the basis of token usage, Ferris said, without adding further detail.
Banks are looking to third-party technology companies to provide AI technology, creating a market for developers like FIS, Ferris said. “You can do AI if you’re a very large [financial institution]. Below that, you can’t afford to spend all your money on the technology in an auditable way. So demand is very strong.”
Another FIS initiative, Project Keystone, is focused for now on tokenizing bank deposits, Ferris said, rather than jumping immediately into token-dependent products such as stablecoins. “The banking industry wants to lean into digital assets, but the challenge for them has been, what’s the use case?” she noted. “With Project Keystone, we’re focused on tokenized deposits as the first use case. That makes a ton of sense for [banks].”
Stablecoins could then follow, Ferris noted. The move to tokenized deposits is “a great first step,” she said. Then, stablecoins could follow, she noted. Banks “know they need to do it, but do it in a regulated way.”
The greater emphasis on AI comes as FIS completed a March quarter in which it reported growth in its two units, banking and capital markets. It closed the quarter with a combined $3.25 billion in revenue, up nearly 8% year-over-year. Revenue for the banking solutions unit grew nearly 9%, to $2.43 billion.
