Nasdaq Verafin is adding agentic AI capabilities to its AI-driven anti-money laundering solutions, in an effort to streamline its fight against fraud. 

The anti-money laundering software arm of Nasdaq last year launched an AI-driven copilot to all its customers, and this year agentic AI is being added as an upgrade to the platform, Rob Norris, senior vice president and head of product at Nasdaq Verafin, told Bank Automation News.

A major use case for agentic AI at financial institutions is fraud mitigation, according to  “AI On: How Financial Services Companies Use Agentic AI to Enhance Productivity, Efficiency and Security,” a research report published by Nvidia on July 22. 

Two tools 

Nasdaq Verafin is deploying two agentic AI tools or digital workers: the Digital Sanctions Analyst and the Digital EDD [enhanced due diligence] Analyst, Norris said. Both are now in beta phase. 

The Digital Sanctions Analyst automates manual repetitive tasks such as scanning through sanctions lists, flagging suspicious transactions and doing basic research before an analyst does a final review, Norris said. 

“If you have a name that matched against someone on the watch list, the agentic AI is able to make reasoning decisions on why that is a good or not a good match,” he said. 

The Digital Sanctions Analyst can reduce a financial institution’s alert review workload by more than 80%, Norris said. 

Meanwhile, the Digital EDD Analyst aids in intensive KYC that each bank must perform to maintain compliance, he said. 

“Some mid-size banks will have upward of 4,000 EDD reviews a year,” Norris said. “Those banks can take up to four hours for each review, and sometimes more.” 

The Digital EDD Analyst will perform all the steps that a human analyst would traditionally do, Norris said.  

“It’ll conduct negative news searches, at the transactional activity, if there were any behavioral anomalies, and it’ll look at if there were any notes placed in the system by other users or other pieces of suspicious information,” Norris said. 

The agentic AI model can create reports and decide whether anomalies should be escalated to a human for review, Norris said.  

The Digital EDD analyst tool, he said, can help banks save up to 16,000 hours each year. 

Development of agentic AI 

Nasdaq Verafin has a long-standing relationship with Amazon Web Services and developed its copilot with the tech giant, Norris said. 

Verafin has “been an AWS-centric business since the early days of Amazon, launching AWS nearly two decades ago,” Norris said.  

“When generative AI was invented and those models became available through Amazon, it was a natural fit too because that’s already where we host our data,” Norris said, adding that Nasdaq is using Amazon Bedrock for its agentic AI tools. 

More than 2,600 FIs use Nasdaq Verafin, according to the company. 

Over time, the agentic AI models will be trained on the data from all 2,600 FIs to make it more accurate and efficient, Norris said. 

Development of agentic AI is ongoing at Nasdaq Verafin, Norris said, adding that it might look to make its agents multi-modal to improve them.