Tech provider Jack Henry has expanded its collaboration with Google Cloud to develop a proprietary AI security platform tailor-made for FIs.

Jack Henry will use Google Cloud’s suite of agentic defense products to develop a platform to defend FIs from emerging threats while improving operational efficiency, Shanon McLachlan, chief operating officer at Jack Henry, told FinAi News.

“Financial institutions operate under a set of constraints and threats that simply do not exist in other sectors,” McLachlan said. “They are top-tier targets. Direct access to capital and high-value personally identifiable information means FIs face far more persistent, highly sophisticated adversaries.

“Defending them requires running real-time fraud detection at a massive, near-instantaneous transaction scale,” he said.

In addition to speed, AI solutions must follow strict regulatory guidelines and be explainable and auditable, McLachlan said.

FIs and fintechs must be able to explain their AI technologies internally and to regulators: How are they used? How do they operate step-by-step? What data is used and where is it stored? How are the systems being maintained and updated?

“Regulators are expecting that you can demonstrate explainability,” Luis Pinedo, chief strategic customers officer at fintech ThetaRay, told FinAi News. “This end-to-end traceability is important [to] demonstrate that the models are working properly.

“It’s [an informational request] that is going to come more and more from the regulators,” he said.

Protecting FIs from cyberthreats should be a priority because FIs represent systemic risk, McLachlan said.

“An outage or data breach can quickly cascade across broader markets,” he said.

High-level distributed denial-of-service attacks disproportionately targeted FIs in 2025, with 34% — the largest share — attacking the industry, according to a June report from tech firm Akamai. And 65% of FIs were hit by ransomware attacks in 2024, according to a report from security firm Sophos. JPMorgan said it faced 45 billion cyberattacks per day in 2024, a number that has likely increased in 2026.

Jack Henry expands Google Cloud collab

Jack Henry began working with Google Cloud in 2022 to power its cloud-first service for banks and credit unions.

Google Cloud has provided cloud infrastructure to modernize Jack Henry’s tech stack, using tools such as AI and flexible integration services.

The new platform does not have a launch date. Rather, Jack Henry will incrementally deploy the new capabilities into its secure development lifecycle, McLachlan said.

The product aims to adhere to strict compliance and regulatory requirements by proactively identifying and mitigating AI-driven cyber threats, he said.

During development, Jack Henry will use Google Cloud’s agentic defense, Mandiant Consulting’s cybersecurity expertise and the Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Google Cloud Chief Operating Officer Francis deSouza said in a June 25 release.

Mandiant is a Google subsidiary.

Jack Henry said it will use the Gemini AI platform in its new product for operational improvements including:

• Supporting customer service teams by improving speed and consistency of issue resolution;
• Using advanced analytics to enhance insights, optimize reporting and better inform decisions; and
• Automating routine administrative tasks.

About 7,400 community banks and credit unions across the United States use Jack Henry products for banking, payment, lending and operations.

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