- Key insight: Anthropic, a company that was designated a supply chain risk by the Pentagon a little over a month ago, has been embraced by large banks and their vendors.
- Expert quote: "The largest institutions have the ability to explore this space at a scale and with a degree of experimentation that a mid-market bank doesn't necessarily have the funding to be on the leading edge of," Nate Porter, director at West Monroe, told American Banker.
- Forward look: At Goldman, CIO Marco Argenti aims to use AI in decision making throughout the bank.
Anthropic on Tuesday launched a slew of AI agents that it co-developed with banks, asset managers and insurers. Its launch event in New York was notable both for the breadth of the announcements related to financial services and the prominence of the speakers the company summoned to its stage.
In addition to
"I think the technology is incredibly powerful," she said at the event.
The next wave of AI "will help us make better decisions — better risk decisions, better investment decisions, faster and smarter,"
Argenti noted that people can interact with AI as "a sparring partner that knows as much as you, or sometimes more than you. And so it kind of goes more profoundly into the way we operate, in the way we think.
"Every single person in every profession needs to think about, 'How do I actually change my habits?'" Argenti said. "'How do I look at things differently, and how can I actually work differently than I used to?' So I think for us, it's like a rethinking of how people make decisions, how people think about the next steps. But I don't think there is going to be any industry that is not touched."
The technology choices of the biggest banks are watched closely by the rest of the industry.
"The largest institutions have the ability to explore this space at a scale and with a degree of experimentation that a mid-market bank doesn't necessarily have the funding to be on the leading edge of," Nate Porter, director at West Monroe, told American Banker. "It's such a regulated industry, and there's so much pressure on not slipping up in this space. So if there's some leadership from the largest institutions, there's a huge volume of banks that are ready to jump in there."
The 10 new Claude agents from Anthropic are designed to handle financial workflows such as writing pitchbooks, earnings analyses and credit memos; underwriting loans; completing know-your-customer tasks; and more.
By creating AI agents for tasks like writing credit memos and pitchbooks, "they're picking the things that are easiest to understand and talk about," Porter said. "The credit memo was probably one of the first places a lot of our minds went when we started to see what these large language models can do, because that is such an exercise of taking a set of information and developing a narrative off of it that is easy to understand and push forward through an approval process. There's a ton more that these models can be doing and engaging with in ways that I think are a little bit more esoteric."
Anthropic also introduced several big-name partnerships on Tuesday. For instance, through a Microsoft collaboration, Claude now works as a single agent across Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, carrying context between these different Microsoft applications. Claude can now work with more data sources used by financial institutions, including Verisk, Third Bridge, Fiscal AI, D&B, Experian, GLG, Guidepoint and IBISWorld. Moody's is bringing its platform into Claude as an embedded app, so Claude can analyze credit ratings and risk data.
Anthropic also announced a partnership this week with
And the bank core system provider FIS announced Tuesday that it is building AI agents for banks alongside Anthropic, starting with one that will help with anti-money-laundering case investigations.
"Every bank in the world wants AI that acts, not just assists," said Stephanie Ferris, CEO and president of FIS, in a statement. "The future is about a trusted provider who manages the data, who governs the agents, and who stands between your customers and the AI making decisions about their money. Anthropic is a leading AI provider, Claude is the reasoning engine inside, and the Financial Crimes AI Agent is the first proof of what this architecture can deliver for financial institutions that are ready to become the agent-first bank of the future."
As they continue AI adoption, a big challenge for banks of all sizes is being able to own and control their own data, Porter said.
"If I were an institution that was looking to design my own future with AI, I would be more excited to be able to extract the information and apply the artificial intelligence that we want to that scenario, as opposed to necessarily being boxed in by a prepackaged solution," Porter said.
Many banks are building data warehouses and data lakes for this reason, he said.
"The goal is to be able to control their own destiny around how they access and use their data," he said. "I do think you're seeing institutions that have made that step and now have the ability to access that information, they will be in a position where they can define their own destiny a little bit in the artificial intelligence space."
