The strategy: Agentic AI could redefine how banks detect and prevent financial crime, according to a recent McKinsey report.

How it works: Agentic AI uses autonomous agents to perform end-to-end tasks relating to anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) efforts. They can assist with everything from gathering information to closing a case, with humans only providing oversight and handling exceptions. 

Using agentic AI can boost fraud prevention teams’ productivity by up to 2,000%, per McKinsey, allowing banks to look at more transaction and customer data—and to do it faster. 

Why it matters: A bank’s brand reputation is tied directly to its ability to prevent financial crime and manage customer experience. A whopping 84% of consumers would switch banks if theirs was linked to financial crime, per a recent ThetaRay report. 

Customers care just as much about the experience with KYC- and AML-related processes as they do about their effectiveness. Nearly three in four respondents would switch banks because of payment delays and intrusive checks caused by ineffective AML controls, per ThetaRay. AI agents’ processing speed can help banks minimize this friction for customers.

Our take: Banks are just beginning to pilot agentic AI and explore use cases, but they should prioritize using it in financial crime prevention. This technology will become essential as traditional methods struggle to keep up with increasingly sophisticated criminal tactics: Despite allocating significant resources to KYC and AML efforts, the financial industry only detects about 2% of global financial crime, per Interpol data.