Frontier AI for Financial Crime: Proud to Be a 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist

Last updated: 13th November 2026

We’re delighted to share that SymphonyAI has been named a Finalist in the 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards for Financial Services. Microsoft selected this year’s winners and finalists from more than 4,500 nominations worldwide. We’re proud to be recognized in a category that reflects where financial crime compliance is heading. You can see the complete list of categories, winners and finalists on Microsoft’s site.

Microsoft’s Chief Partner Officer, Nicole Dezen, framed this year’s awards around Frontier Transformation: moving beyond isolated AI experiments to reimagine how work gets done. In financial crime, that shift is already underway, and banks need AI that runs in production, at scale, every day.

Our 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year award recognized our AI innovation. This year’s finalist recognition reflects what that innovation now does for financial institutions in production.

Why financial crime compliance needs a reset

Our FinCrime Frontier 2026–27 research, conducted with AML Intelligence, shows the gap between ambition and operations:

• AI and automation is the top compliance investment priority for 61.9% of organizations.

• Yet 76.3% still review alerts manually or with only partial automation.

• Only 4.7% continuously update their monitoring and controls as risk changes.

Regulators are shifting their focus as well. They are no longer just checking whether firms have a policy. They are asking whether the technology behind it performs as expected and can be evidenced. The traditional answer, adding more people, runs out of road. Agentic AI offers a different model.

As Stephen Rae, Co-Founder and Chair of AML Intelligence, put it: “Most financial institutions aren’t short on commitment to modernizing compliance, they’re short on operating tempo.”

What a Frontier Firm looks like in financial crime

Microsoft describes a Frontier Firm as an AI-first organization powered by on-demand intelligence and run by hybrid teams of humans and AI agents. Symphony Risk Intelligence (SRI), our agent-native platform enabling Always-on Compliance™, is how we bring that model to financial crime compliance.

At the core of SRI is a System of Intelligence that continuously determines what has changed in regulations, threats, policy and customer risk, where it matters, and what action it requires. That determination directs the work: agents take on detection, triage, investigation and reporting based on what has just changed, not on a fixed schedule or a static set of rules, so compliance keeps pace with risk instead of catching up to it after the fact. Governance runs alongside that continuous direction, not after it: defined boundaries on what each agent can do, human oversight configurable from semi- to fully autonomous, and a complete audit trail behind every decision, extended on the same terms to agents an institution builds itself.

SRI is also modular, so institutions can start wherever the need is greatest. That might be a single targeted problem or a full domain transformation, such as end-to-end transaction monitoring. Teams can close coverage gaps in weeks rather than months, absorb manual work without adding headcount, cut alert noise while surfacing real risk, stand audit-ready by default, and reduce the cost of running compliance day to day.

How SRI agents work

SRI Agents transform compliance workflows across your existing systems. They build on shared financial crime expertise to reduce manual effort, expand capacity and strengthen regulatory confidence, with governance embedded throughout.

SRI is not a single agent. It is a team of agents. Specialist agents handle discrete tasks, from resolving customer data to researching counterparties, while manager agents decide which agent runs next, what it can access, and when a human must review. That orchestration is what makes the work agentic: the system works through multi-step tasks, adapts as new evidence emerges, and hands off to people at defined control points.

The agents cover the whole AML value chain, not just investigations:

• Data and KYC: resolving entities and maintaining a golden customer record across systems

• Detection and coverage: monitoring threat and regulatory intelligence and mapping it against existing controls to find gaps

• Alert generation: scoring and prioritizing alerts against the institution’s risk appetite

• Investigation: assembling evidence, researching counterparties and drafting a policy-aligned case narrative

• Reporting: pre-populating disclosures with full lineage back to source evidence

• Model tuning: learning from adjudication outcomes to refine detection continuously

Governance is built in, not added afterward. Every agent run records the data accessed, the tools and models used, the decisions made and the human approvals. Each institution can choose the models that suit its performance, cost, latency and data-residency needs, and can govern its own or third-party agents on the same framework.  

Read the full analysis: Celent’s Agentic AI in Action: Symphony Risk Intelligence brief covers the architecture, governance and outcomes in depth.

Proven by customers and validated by analysts

Results from our customers show what this looks like in production:

• A major US financial institution: Broad name-matching logic was generating high false-positive volumes, with each hit taking 100+ minutes of manual review. SRI agents, trained on the bank’s policies, now handle entity resolution, name disambiguation and prioritization. Running 50 agents in parallel, they adjudicate more than 300 alerts an hour, cutting false positives by 99% and manual effort by 90%, with 98%+ agreement with investigators. Read the case study.

• Absa: A 77% reduction in transaction-monitoring false positives, with full detection of all previously identified suspicious activity. The partnership also identified 21 risk types the existing system had missed, and won the ICA Compliance Award for breakthrough collaboration in AI-driven risk management. Read the case study.

• Metro Bank: A decade-old legacy financial crime stack replaced by one unified SaaS platform on Azure. Payment screening went live in four hours, and the rest of the suite followed within 24 hours over a single weekend. Transaction-monitoring alerts fell by 20% shortly after go-live. Read the case study.

Independent analysts agree. Forrester named SymphonyAI a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Financial Crime Management Solutions, Q3 2026, with the highest combined strategy and offering score of the 15 vendors evaluated. Chartis awarded us the Agentic Platforms – Compliance award in its RiskTech100® 2027.

Better together: SymphonyAI and Microsoft

Microsoft brings the foundation: Azure's secure, compliant cloud and Azure OpenAI. We bring 25 years of financial crime expertise, a financial crime ontology, domain-trained agents and the governance regulators expect. We’re proud of how closely our platform and Microsoft’s work together:

• SRI is designed to leverage Azure. We’ve re-platformed the full SRI platform onto Azure, so every SRI customer runs on Microsoft cloud.

• Agents run on Azure AI. Every SRI agent and the SRI Copilot run on Azure OpenAI Service, orchestrated across Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure AI Search.

• Available through Microsoft Marketplace. Banks can buy SRI through Microsoft Marketplace, with time to value in weeks.

Our partnership reaches back to 2022. We were a launch partner for the reimagined Microsoft Marketplace, and we’ve grown our joint financial services wins roughly sevenfold year over year. Together, we’re helping banks become the AI-powered Frontier Firms that Microsoft envisions.

Where this leads: Always-on Compliance™

Our goal is Always-on Compliance™: a continuous operation that connects changing risk signals to monitoring, assessment and control updates, with people accountable for the decisions that matter. Agents keep the operation current, and our people remain responsible for what matters most.

Thank you

We thank our customers, who trusted us with their most critical compliance operations, our Microsoft colleagues, and our SymphonyAI team. Congratulations to all this year’s winners and finalists.

The operating model for risk and compliance is being reset, and we intend to lead that change alongside Microsoft.

Learn more: Explore Symphony Risk Intelligence, or download the FinCrime Frontier 2026–27 report.

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