Nasdaq Verafin Brings Agentic AI to the Fight Against Financial Crime

The challenges and costs of compliance continue to grow each year for financial institutions, but Nasdaq is introducing a step change in the fight against financial crime with the launch of its Agentic AI Workforce.

Nasdaq Verafin, the leading provider of financial crime management technology, has unveiled a suite of digital workers designed to transform how financial institutions approach anti-money laundering (AML) compliance. These AI-powered agents can execute complex tasks—including decisioning—with minimal supervision, automating low-value, high-volume compliance processes and freeing up human analysts for higher-value work.

The launch builds on the successful adoption of Nasdaq Verafin’s genAI Entity Research copilot, which has been adopted by more than 1,300 clients to date.

“Our customers at financial institutions have seen the cost of AML compliance rising – regulations are increasing in complexity, and there are very steep fines and penalties for not executing on requirements correctly,” said Rob Norris, Senior Vice President and Head of Product at Nasdaq Verafin.

“One of the biggest challenges that financial institutions have is staffing for those roles, so our focus at Nasdaq Verafin has been on creating increased efficiency. To that end, our Agentic AI Workforce allows financial institutions to deploy digital agents as they would analysts to execute on repetitive tasks, enabling their existing workforce to focus on more important things.”

A survey from Nasdaq Verafin of over 200 industry professionals found that 75% had increased headcount investments over the past year to bolster financial crime prevention. Yet nearly half reported inadequate resources and technology to meet the challenge.

“We hear from our customers that compliance costs are growing. There's definitely a demand and a need for more efficient tools,” Norris said.

Why Agentic AI

Agentic AI fills this gap. Building on advances in large language models, this technology introduces reasoning capabilities to automation—giving AI the agency to act without constant human prompting. It’s a natural evolution from earlier copilot systems, which require user input to assist or respond.

“The technology has matured to the point where software can now make certain decisions independently,” said Norris. “We’re embedding the latest capabilities into our platform to help financial institutions maintain AML compliance—faster and at lower cost.”

The first two digital workers set to be released by Nasdaq Verafin will focus on some of the most resource-intensive areas of compliance: sanctions screening and enhanced due diligence (EDD) reviews.

Currently in beta, this pair of digital workers is expected to be available to Nasdaq Verafin clients later this year.

The Digital Sanctions Analyst will analyze sanctions alerts, disposition false positives and escalate true matches for further review—mirroring the judgment of a human analyst. Sanctions compliance is a complex and costly challenge, often burdened by an overwhelming number of false positives. Initial results show that the Digital Sanctions Analyst can reduce a financial institution’s alert review workload by over 80%.

The Digital EDD Analyst automates periodic reviews by actioning low-risk cases that don’t require further investigation, significantly reducing operational costs. This is especially impactful as most institutions still rely on time-consuming manual processes to meet regulatory requirements for reviewing high-risk customers.

“The reason we focused on screening sanctions alerts for one of our first AI workers is that Sanction Screening alert volume is a problem for financial institutions universally. The degree of this problem largely depends on the quality of screening algorithms but even solutions with great screening analytics  the volume is still unwieldy because financial institutions don’t want to accidentally miss anything that leads to a steep penalty,” Norris explained. “Our new digital workers will specialize in this analysis and be able to decide on whether to clear or escalate alerts the same way a human worker would. So customers can keep risk tolerance low without having to worry about how to keep up with the alert volume.”

Importantly, the Nasdaq Verafin agentic AI workers are built to extensively document their reasoning, creating clear audit trails and allowing for a significant amount of transparency. Additionally, the systems will be able to run in a “recommendation mode,” Norris said, explaining that this will ensure that financial institutions feel comfortable with digital workers’ capacity for decision making before enabling them to directly clear or escalate alerts. There will also be a quality assurance and quality control layer for financial institutions to manage and audit the performance of the digital workers.

Why Nasdaq Verafin

This innovation was only possible because of Nasdaq’s deep experience in the AML space.

“We have a great amount of history to draw from in the testing of these models,” Norris said. “We're a cloud provider of the software to over 2,600 financial institutions, so we have a lot of data concerning the many thousands of scenarios that sanctions analysts have worked on our systems.”

Nasdaq Verafin takes a data consortium approach, Norris explained, noting that the long-standing position as a leading provider has built a robust data set that has led to strong models “from day zero.” 

Another important factor, according to Norris, is that the agentic AI workforce can be deployed quickly and seamlessly into existing workflows that have been developed in concert with customers over the years.

“We have a great amount of subject matter expertise that has come from working with our customers to really hone these models into exactly what they want and need,” he said. “Both our experience in building technology and our close relationship with the industry give us a significant advantage in making the best and most effective digital workers.”

As for the future, Norris emphasized that the Nasdaq Verafin approach to AML is to drive both efficiency and effectiveness. Deploying digital workers for more routine functions, he explained, allows financial institutions to focus their teams on true situations of crimes such as human trafficking, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing: “Our long-term vision is the automation of the less valuable portions of compliance so that teams can focus on the most impactful work.”

Learn more about Nasdaq Verafin’s agentic AI workforce.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Information set forth in this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Nasdaq cautions readers that any forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and that actual results could differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as “will,” “may”, and other words and terms of similar meaning. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements related to potential savings, efficiency gains, or product results. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond Nasdaq’s control. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in Nasdaq’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q which are available on Nasdaq’s investor relations website at http://ir.nasdaq.com and the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Nasdaq undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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