The paradigm shift in financial crime compliance

While rising alert volumes, expanding regulatory expectations, and the need for fast, defensible decisions continue to challenge financial crime compliance (FCC) teams.

For years, compliance teams have sought to address these issues by improving detection models to weed out more false positives. The thinking: reduce upstream volume to reduce downstream investigatory work. But—despite years of effort and billions in investment, false positive remain stubbornly high.

It’s time for a new approach: one that focuses on investigation, not detection.

That’s the big pivot that this white paper explores: why investigation is such a promising place to focus—particularly now that new end-to-end solutions leveraging agentic AI and AI agents make this shift fast, practical, and non-disruptive.

Key Takeaways

• Why traditional, detection-centric approaches to FCC are reaching their limits

• How agentic AI is changing what can be automated in investigative work

• What a new, agent-driven operating model for investigations looks like in practice

• How institutions can modernize FCC without replacing detection systems

• What this shift means for investigation quality, consistency, and compliance outcomes