Anthropic: Accelerating frontier AI in Financial Services.

morning.

I'm Belinda and this is Keon and we're from Anthropic.

We work with financial services firms.

As Keon gets set up here, we'll start with a little bit of background.

My name is Belinda Neal, and I'm the Managing Director of Financial Services at Anthropic.

Previously to joining Anthropic this year, I worked at Goldman Sachs for 19 years across engineering, global markets, and equity research.

My role at Anthropic sits at the confluence of our industry, our product, our research, and our go-to-market teams,

really in accelerating the adoption of AI within financial services.

Keon.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here.

My name is Keon Shahab. I'm an Applied AI Architect at Anthropic.

Prior to Anthropic, I spent five years at Databricks

helping financial services companies

modernize their data and AI architecture.

So we're excited to speak to you this morning,

and our talk is going to cover three ideas.

Firstly, the frontier of intelligence.

How is this room taking the frontier models

and applying it in ways that create alpha or edge

within your firm?

The second is the frontier of adoption.

How are you scaling what you've built

based on the foundation of a few to many?

And then last, how are we applying it to financial services?

We're going to bring an example in here about how we've been innovating in the wealth industry

in Claude for financial advisors.

And that paradigm compounds potentially to other areas of financial services as well.

So let's get started and talk about the frontier of intelligence.

So every so often, a model crosses a threshold.

And when it does, a way of working changes.

We first saw this encoding last year with Opus 4.5 and Claude code.

Many of you in the room are using these tools,

and you've gone from autocomplete encoding

to managing fleets of agents

where you're really driving and accelerating

a multiple effect of how you're doing coding.

We also saw this threshold cross this year

in cyber with Claude Mythos Preview,

and many of you are also spending time

on the cyber programs in your firms.

What's next?

Finance.

We've started now in finance with early agents

and bringing Claude into the products and services

that you use day to day.

One example here is Citadel told us at our briefing event in May that their investment professionals started to use Claude for Excel, and it gives them a step change function in how they can test, build, and trust their work.

We're really excited for the potential of Claude within the tools and the use cases that this room is building.

But here's the challenge.

Intelligence is ahead of adoption.

What a model can do on its own is doubling every four months.

PwC published early this year

that the capabilities of AI

are going to three quarters of companies.

Sorry, three quarters of the economic gains of AI

are going to a fifth of companies.

This is what we call the diffusion gap.

If you're not building close enough to the curve,

there's opportunity for you to take the frontier

and be able to apply it in your workflows.

We work with firms across financial services,

across our model family,

most of which hopefully this room is familiar with.

We have Haiku.

for speed and volume.

Sonnet for everyday work.

Opus as the daily driver for financial services,

complex tasks, and agentic coding.

And Fable, our frontier model

that can effectively be used

for the hardest work in your firms.

One example here from Millennium

on our most recent model blog

was a PM used Fable

to find a piece of code

that had a bug,

and it was unexplained in five years.

Fable was able to find it.

We're starting to see our models get used in this industry in new and creative ways,

and we believe the frontier of intelligence is just getting started.

Every model release gets smarter, cheaper and safer, so it's really important to take

a minute to call out how the model frontier is continuing to develop here.

Firstly, the intelligence is going up.

Now a model can work for 16 plus hours on its own.

This is up from just minutes in 2023.

In terms of cost per task, it's going down.

The most recent Opus 5.5 model was 40% more cost-efficient than Opus 5.

You can also see those impact metrics for Haiku, Sonnet, and Fable.

And lastly, safety.

This is something we care a lot about at Anthropic.

In the most recent model of Fable 5.1, only 1% of propped injection attacks were successful.

This is relative to other frontier models in the region of 9% to 53%.

So we're really investing in safety alongside capability at Anthropic.

And the banks know this.

The last most recent Evident AI 2026 report that came out last week showed us that banks are 26% ahead of their AI maturity scores.

We're really investing in scaling in applying this technology to our industry.

A few use cases to call out from this report, which are publicly citable use cases that have been reported, is firstly on areas like fraud.

One bank found that with auto loans, they were able to reduce $120 million of potential fraud in 12 months.

In another area, in post-earnings research,

a draft of a report was able to be generated in 15 minutes relative to 45 minutes.

And you can see other use cases here and more broadly across the industry

as we start to talk about the value of AI and the impact we're generating on our business.

So where are we?

In 2023, we built chatbots.

Everyone was asking a question and going backwards and forwards with the model.

In 2024, we brought pilots to firms

and we started to get more knowledge bases and data into these AI systems.

From 2025 to now, we're now building agents.

And in the most case in this room, we're building them hand by hand, one by one.

And our opportunity here to scale is not the model.

Our opportunity here to scale is building the foundation for agents that can go from one to many.

So the next part of the talk, we wanted to spend time focusing on how you can build the agent foundation

that will allow you to scale the frontier of adoption.

So over to you, Keon.

Amazing.

Thank you, Belinda. So, Belinda, as you've just said, there's no better time than now to start

experimenting and building with agents. For this portion of the talk, we want to talk a little bit

about how you can go from that experimentation phase towards productionizing and scaling agents.

But first, some observations that we've seen across the industry. A year ago, we could think

about this as the year of exploration, where engineers were working on a handful of use cases.

They were in POC and pilot mode.

And they took their learnings and transitioned that into this year,

where we've seen this be the age of production.

So we've seen these handful of agents go to production.

A lot of them have been built by hand.

What I think will happen next year is we'll go into the age of scale.

We'll have many agents built on one solidified foundation.

And as Belinda just mentioned,

the models are now the easiest part of the equation here.

We know that the models can handle high-quality tasks,

and we're confident about that.

But what we want to talk about here

is building this five-layer framework

for scaling and productionizing your agents.

Starting from the bottom,

we first want to look at what the agent can do.

So we can give it context for our business use cases

via connectors so that it can reach our systems and data.

Then we want to give it context

for our actual business rules and processes via skills.

Once that's done, we want to think about building the trust layer for the agents.

We can think about that in three general steps.

Who the agent is acting as with an identity and permissions layer, how we can sandbox and

determine the approval layer of the agent so that someone is signing off before it acts,

and lastly, how we know the agent will still work once we adjust any variables over time.

So let's look at each of these five.

Perfect.

So if you've started building agents already, you may think of giving those agents access to your underlying systems and data, manually wiring them by hand to a handful of different source systems.

And that could work for maybe five agents and five systems.

Then you'll have 25 systems to maintain and manage.

But as you think about scaling up your agents into new specialized various tasks,

you'll

want to have those agents work off of one secure connectivity layer, which is MCP. That'll make it a lot easier for you to build at scale with one repeatable framework. Next, let's say now we have the agent have context to our underlying business data and systems. Now we want to give it more context to

into our actual business rules and processes.

And that's done through skills.

And this is where the SMEs that really do the work

and understand the process and the work come into the picture.

And from here on, we're going to look at an agent use case

for a trade break investigation agent.

And we're going to follow this across for the next steps.

In this case, a trade break agent is meant to look at two records

of a single trade that don't match.

And here you can see steps one through three.

a little bit of a simplified version,

but this is the business context that an SME provides.

And we think about skills as living, breathing, versioned code, essentially,

even though they're just plain text.

They're meant to be dynamic.

They're meant to be updated frequently.

All right.

So now we have our context layer for the agent.

We have the agent having access to our source systems and data.

We have the agent that understands how to go from a generalized model to a specialized agent with skills.

Now we want to talk about building the trust layer with that agent.

And first, let's start with the identity and permissions layer.

So here you can see the identity of the agent.

We're going to assign it.

It's going to be the trade break investigator.

We're going to give it a role with permissions called ops analyst.

And you can see here, once that agent needs to go and reach our source systems,

like our order data and our market data, it'll have permission to read.

But if it tries to go reach for our CRM data, it'll be denied.

And we will do that on purpose so that it won't overreach for sources of data that it shouldn't have access to.

And lastly, we don't necessarily want this agent to perform on behalf of us.

We want it to just propose new amendments to our orders data, not actually make those amendments.

And that's where we'll look at on the next slide how we can keep the human in the loop here.

All right. So this is kind of the layer of who signs off before the agent acts, right?

Many of you have heard the term sandbox. We can use that terminology here as well

for putting an approval layer around the agent so that you can see here the four-step process.

The agent will actually go and propose a booking amendment. It'll actually try to

proceed through the process with the context that it has and the source systems and data

that it has access to, but then it'll look for a human, an SME, someone in the loop,

in the process, to approve.

Once they approve, then that amendment will be made and the change will be applied.

This is the layer where you can also put deterministic guardrails called hooks around your agent

so that it's never overreaching beyond what you would like it to do within its confines.

All right.

So now we have a full agent.

Let's say it's in production.

It's working great.

And let's say that we want to make an adjustment to this agent.

Let's say that a new model is shipped,

or we want to make an adjustment to the business context layer with the skills.

How do we actually know if these adjustments are improving the agent

or if they're causing a regression?

So that's our evals layer.

This is where your SMEs, your business users who are in the loop,

who understand the process help determine a set of test cases

to test the agent against with a benchmark or a baseline

so that once you apply any change to any variable,

you'll be able to determine whether that variable change

actually improved the behavior of the agent

or if it caused it to regress, as you'll see here in some of the examples.

All right.

So hopefully you've seen, by building once,

with a foundational layer that you trust,

you can work at speed to deploy many agents at scale.

For us, financial services and regulated industries

doesn't mean slow.

It means that we're seeing a lot of innovation

from the financial sector,

and we're seeing it go hand-in-hand

with security and safety as well.

And those three layers that we just walked through,

who the agent is acting as, who signs off,

and how you still know that agent works,

are the key components of building a safe and secure agent framework.

And once you have this framework that you've built,

you can use it to apply to any new agent that you want to build

for any specialty use case.

So you can see at the top, you'll have your foundation.

And then at the bottom, you'll see where you can actually

bring in more specialty along the way as you continue to scale.

That specialty is worked in combination with the business and engineering

to make sure that the proper business rules and context

are being integrated into the agent workflow.

And you might be wondering,

we haven't mentioned anything like Claude Code yet.

Well, everything that we've talked about so far

has, let's say, four different doors

that you can access it from.

So a business person can access it from Claude Cowork,

an engineer can access it from Claude Code,

or you can take this to the next step

and give the agent more work to do in your own UI environment

via things like managed agents or agent SDK.

Now, so far we've talked about building a secure,

trustable agent foundation framework.

Now let's talk a little bit about the operating model.

Some observations that we've seen,

especially in financial services,

is that the business is now becoming closer to engineering.

And the way that we're observing this is that the business will directly work with the agent that engineering has built.

They'll have direct capabilities to correct that agent or amend it, propose adjustments,

and that's where engineering is in the loop as well.

Once you see the list of proposed adjustments, you can solidify that as a scale change

after you've reviewed and tested all that within your eval framework.

And then anything new that you ship goes right back to the business, and they'll go through the same loop again to continuously improve the overall agent and the process.

All right.

So far we've talked about building the agent framework in a way that you can build once for scale.

And we've talked about how you can turn a generalized, highly intelligent model into a specialized agent.

Now I want to hand it off to Belinda to talk a little bit more about what we're seeing in the industry

by building some of the foundations ourselves for the next step here, which is Claude for Financial Advisors.

Thank you, Keon.

So what you've just seen is us building a foundation once in a firm.

Now I want to talk about how we could take that same approach to our industry.

This foundation we've built in Claude for Financial Advisors,

and whilst you might not all in the room sit in the wealth or the advisor space,

I want you to take this as a pattern and an opportunity to start to think about how we can actually coordinate at an industry level.

So in September, we launched Claude for Financial Advisors, the orchestrator across the stack of an advisor.

This was built on the foundation that advisors only spend approximately 20% of their time with clients.

We wanted to find a way where advisors could spend more time with clients and more time growing their franchise.

So what did we do?

We went through the agent foundation and found ways to scale.

At layer one, we brought connectors in.

The industry system, the deterministic numbers,

and the scaled system that advisors trust,

we brought into the ecosystem.

Layer two, we built skills.

We built a plugin that is available on GitHub

that builds eight skills and workflows

that an advisor can take out of the box,

use today, and amend for tomorrow.

Layer four, approval.

The advisor approves everything that comes out of Claude.

Nothing is saved or sent without the advisor.

and that trust principle holds here too.

And so you can see here on the diagram on the left,

CRM, market data, custodians,

all the tools and foundations and advisor needs

brought into Claude.

So let's go through layer one, the connectors.

We brought in 25 platforms across custody,

portfolio, planning, data, and CRM,

names such as Schwab, Adapar, Salesforce, and more.

And there's more connectors that you can find

on the Claude marketplace.

This is where the industry builds once

the advisor can integrate once, and this is what compounding looks like.

Layer 2 skills.

These are the workflows we built for the advisor

that they can start with and adjust and amend to their own firm.

For example, pre-meeting prep allows an advisor

to bring a full family plan into one brief across multiple systems.

The follow-up allows the advisor to bring those meeting notes,

enter them into the CRM system,

and actually follow through the existing systems and tools.

Nothing goes out until the advisor approves it.

And this skill foundation is a baseline

of which we imagine advisors will start to innovate

and bring Claude into more and more of their workflows,

allowing them to drive impact in their business.

So, in closing, with 28 seconds on the clock,

three questions to take to your firm today.

The first one is the workflow.

How are you applying the frontier intelligence to your firm?

How are you gaining edge and alpha from the frontier models today?

The second is the foundation.

Do you all have a foundation that you trust

for building and scaling agents for the future

as things become more and more specialized?

One connector. How are you actually building the foundations that others can use? Are you building connectors and skills for your users, for your firm, and for the industry?

With that, thank you so much for having us. Enjoy the rest of the conference.