Financial institutions have spent the better part of two years experimenting with AI in financial crime operations. The harder question now facing the industry is no longer whether AI can help, but how to put it to work inside the investigative process in a way that delivers measurable operational value without compromising control.
Zenus Bank is answering that question directly. Building on the embedded compliance architecture that earned it a 2026 Celent Model Risk Manager Award for Operational Resilience, the bank is expanding its use of NICE Actimize to bring agentic AI-powered investigation capabilities into the workflows its financial crime investigators use every day.
An Award-Winning Foundation Built for Scale
Headquartered in Puerto Rico, Zenus Bank provides secure, borderless access to U.S. banking services for businesses and financial institutions in more than 180 countries. As the organization evolved into a global embedded banking infrastructure provider, it recognized that traditional approaches to compliance would not scale with its ambitions. Zenus made a deliberate architectural choice to build compliance and fraud controls directly into customer onboarding, transaction monitoring and ongoing risk management processes. This embedded approach enabled the organization to grow rapidly while maintaining strong oversight across its expanding international network.
The strength of that embedded compliance architecture was recognized in Zenus Bank's 2026 Celent Model Risk Manager Award for Operational Resilience. Celent highlighted how Zenus treats compliance "not as a control layer around the business, but as the infrastructure that makes the business possible." NICE Actimize sits at the center of that infrastructure, providing continuous transaction surveillance across ACH, FedWire, SWIFT, card and stablecoin rails, along with machine-learning AML models, behavioral anomaly detection, sanctions screening and case management.
Agentic AI Inside the Investigator Workflow
A compliance function operating at this scale generates increasing investigative demands. Zenus's response is to move from AI experimentation to execution, leveraging NICE Actimize's agentic AI investigation capabilities directly into ActOne.
The expanded footprint adds Actimize InvestigateAI and NarrateAI to a NICE Actimize environment Zenus already runs in the cloud, leveraging Actimize Suspicious Activity Monitoring (SAM), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), Watchlist Filtering (WLX) and Fraud Monitoring (IFM) solutions on ActOne’s single unified platform.
The practical change is in how an investigation begins. Today, when an alert is generated, an investigator often has to pull customer information, transaction activity and related compliance data from multiple systems before any analysis can start. With the embedded agentic AI capabilities in ActOne, Zenus automates the consolidation of that information into the investigator workflows, bringing customer, transaction, fraud and compliance data together so the investigator starts with complete context and a holistic view of customer risk.
For Zenus, the operational case for agentic investigations rests on several outcomes the deployment is built to achieve:
- Reduced investigation times by automatically gathering relevant customer, transaction and compliance information and surfacing context and insights to cut manual research
- More comprehensive risk assessment by unifying AML and fraud intelligence and workflows for a more complete picture of customer activity.
- Preservation of investigative context by capturing and retaining insights to support future reviews, audits and investigations.
- Achieve operational efficiency at scale, allowing investigation volumes to grow through more streamlined and consistent workflows without proportional increases in headcount.
"By leveraging the ActOne agentic AI capabilities, we are transforming how investigations are conducted at Zenus," said Gabriel Viera, Chief Compliance Officer at Zenus Bank. "We're enabling our teams to move faster, leverage institutional knowledge more effectively, and gain a more holistic view of customer risk across AML, KYC, and fraud. This is a significant step forward in scaling our compliance operations while maintaining the highest standards of financial crime prevention."
"Financial institutions are increasingly focused on moving beyond AI experimentation and applying AI in ways that deliver measurable operational value," said Chad Hetherington, Global Head of Product at NICE Actimize. "Zenus Bank's adoption of NICE Actimize agentic AI capabilities demonstrates how organizations can equip their FinCrime teams with broader context, support more informed decision-making and improve operational efficiency while maintaining a strong focus on managing financial crime risk."
Zenus Bank's path reflects a broader shift now underway across financial services: from proving that AI works to operationalizing it where it matters most. By extending an embedded, award-winning compliance architecture with agentic investigation capabilities, Zenus is showing how institutions can give investigators broader context and a more holistic view of risk, scaling fraud and AML crime operations without trading away the control that regulators expect.