If you’re a financial crime investigator, KYC analyst, transaction monitoring investigator, or sanctions specialist, your daily reality is likely a mountain of alerts, swivel-chairing into a maze of legacy systems, and the constant pressure of keeping up with the volumes, policy changes, and documentation requirements, while maintaining productivity goals.
“Early in my career I observed users building their own Word templates, Excel sheets, and other time saving features to help make the manual aspect of their roles much easier and more repeatable.” Adds Richard Graham, KYC Industry Practice Lead, Moody’s.
Many users could spend more time chasing data and clearing low-level alerts than they do on actual, complex investigations, which is where these investigators excel. It can be a frustrating cycle of being reactive but, with digital coworkers, this could change.
Artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically a new class of "agentic AI," could become a powerful partner, freeing users from monotonous work and elevating the role to one of strategic importance, while specialists make decisions with contextual inputs from a digital coworker.
As partners in the financial crime technology space, both Fenergo and Moody's have recently released in-depth reports that, when viewed together, paint a clearer picture of this transformation. Let's look at the data and see what it means for career paths.
First, let's validate the pain you may feel every day. The current state of financial crime operations is incredibly resource-intensive and inefficient. Fenergo's Financial Crime Industry Trends 2025 report puts numbers to this:
This data highglights what investigators know instinctively: a massive amount of human effort is being spent on repetitive, manual tasks that create friction, frustrate clients, and burn out skilled analysts. Redeploying these analysts to more interesting works, empowers them to do the work they and their company values, while also spending less time on monotonous tasks, which are important but not why investigators do this type of work.
“The reality is that financial crime teams are overwhelmed not by complexity, but by volume. Highly skilled investigators are spending the majority of their time on repetitive, manual tasks that add friction but little value. This isn’t sustainable. To truly tackle financial crime, institutions need to shift from labor-intensive processes to intelligent, automated workflows that free up human expertise for the decisions that matter most.” adds Tracy Moore, Director of Thought Leadership at Fenergo.
This is where the game changes. Fenergo’s report highlights that 82% of financial institutions are already using AI to automate labor-intensive KYC/AML processes. The next evolution is agentic AI, which are specialist agents that can perform specific, repeatable tasks before a decision is made.
Think of an AI agent not as a simple tool, but as a digital team member. While older AI could analyze data and generative AI can summarize it, Fenergo describes agentic AI as something that can "autonomously plan and execute end-to-end workflows."
In practice, this means an AI agent can:
This is the work Fenergo's report says can be transformed from fragmented manual tasks into an orchestrated digital workflow. A new AI partner that handles data gathering, preliminary analysis, and clearing false positives, leaving users with a cleaner, more focused workload. And when the AI Agent does not know what to do, it can ask for human input.
So, if the AI is doing all that, what’s left for the investigators? This is where the Moody's report, "From reactive to proactive: How AI is transforming risk and compliance," provides a vision for the investigator of the future.
The report found an overwhelming 96% of risk and compliance professionals expect their roles to be impacted by AI. But here’s the crucial part: 82% believe their roles will remain but evolve.
The focus is shifting from manual execution to human judgment and strategic oversight. According to the Moody's study, investigators will:
Imagine this: Instead of starting the day with a queue of 200 low-risk companies that need KYC refreshes, the AI agent has already compiled the policy data for each company across internal and external data sources, summarized the adverse media, mapped out the corporate structures, and attached a note saying, "98% of standard periodic reviews were auto-completed” and need the human user to agree with the findings.
In addition, the findings show three substantial changes that need human review, including reviewing potential changes that indicate the company is a shell company, that ownership has changed to a new jurisdiction that was not reported by the customer, and other anomalous behaviors that caused an agent to review the transactions and provide the human user with a summary of the transactions to review.
This means the entire day can now be dedicated to what you were hired to do: investigate. Critical thinking can be used to unravel complex networks, make nuanced judgment calls, and protect the organization from genuine threats while wasting less of your precious time on false positives.
The consensus from both Fenergo and Moody's is clear. The future of financial crime investigation is a powerful partnership between human and machine. The AI handles the volume and the velocity; you provide the intellect, the intuition, and the strategy. This isn't a threat to your job, it's the opportunity to do the meaningful, high-impact work you've always wanted to do.
For more information about Moody’s solutions and our alliance with Fenergo, please get in touch any time. We would love to hear from you.
*Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, compliance or other professional advice. Please consult with a qualified professional for specific legal, financial, compliance, or other professional advice. For more terms and conditions pertaining to Moody’s products and services, refer to the https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/legal/global-disclaimer.html on Moody’s website.