Fraud management and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions share common traits and requirements: Both are about risk scoring of entities (names, phone numbers, email addresses, accounts) and routing and investigating alerts and cases to AI agents and human investigators. While smaller, regional financial institutions (FIs) and insurers have always been motivated to consolidate tools and resources into a single financial crime management solution (primarily for staffing and budget considerations), we now see tier-two and larger FIs wanting to move toward a unified approach that combines fraud management and anti-money laundering. We are calling this segment financial crime management solutions (FCMSes).

Here are the primary reasons for the above shift:

  • Lines between fraud management and AML are blurring. Business processes have also evolved. The process, staffing, and technology-solution dividing lines between customer sanctions screening, payment sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring for fraud and money laundering have also been blurring for the past 24–36 months as 1) regulators have stepped up their scrutiny (FinCEN focusing on independent financial advisor AML and cash, nonfinanced real estate purchase reporting) and 2) fraudsters increasingly cross over to money laundering (including using phishing and social engineering) in their malicious activities.
  • Protecting agentic AI transactions and using agentic AI to fight financial crime is expensive still but becoming mainstream. Another reason for the FCMS consolidation is that traditional, siloed tools are ineffective at supporting AI agents — vendors have had to write two models for AI agent fraud and AML defenses and use a dual stack of AI agents in their enterprise fraud management (EFM) and AML tools, respectively. This is expensive and inefficient.
  • Labor cost reductions are imperative. FIs cannot afford to have separate EFM and AML towers, each tower with its dedicated data scientists, investigators, and compliance professionals. While AI agents in investigation and report writing are increasing capacity, demands to generate labor cost savings are pushing FIs toward FCMSes.

In response to these trends and interactions with Forrester clients, we are consolidating our EFM and AML evaluative research into a single research stream: financial crime management solutions. The first installment is The Financial Crime Management Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026. We are planning to publish a Forrester Wave™ on FCMSes in Q3 of 2026.

Forrester clients who want to dive deeper into this topic and discuss the role that FCMSes should play in their financial crime defenses should schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me.