AI agents and regulatory change: Finextra schedules Workday webinar

Finextra, in association with Workday, will hold an online webinar on 14 October 2026 on how financial institutions can use AI agents for regulatory change. The session is scheduled for 15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST and 10:00 EDT, and will examine whether agents can shorten the information-gathering stage of compliance work without displacing specialist judgement, according to Finextra.

The operational issue is broader than a compliance team interpreting a new rule. Finextra says a reporting expectation, sanctions restriction or internal policy requirement can prompt work across finance, procurement, legal, human resources, operations and IT. Institutions may need to establish which contracts, suppliers or customers are affected, change processes, identify reporting data and assess staffing or cost implications.

How can AI agents help with regulatory change?

AI agents are software systems that can perform tasks for a user or system with some degree of autonomy, according to a Blue Prism vendor blog. In the regulatory-change use case described by Finextra, their proposed role is to collect and connect records held in separate systems, rather than determine the institution's response.

That context can include contract terms, supplier records, financial information, organisational structures, policies and prior process records. Bringing those materials together could allow compliance, legal, finance and HR specialists to assess impacts more quickly and coordinate follow-up work, Finextra says. The event description presents this as a potential benefit, rather than an independently verified outcome.

The division of responsibilities is central. Specialists remain responsible for judgement and decisions; agents are intended to reduce the manual effort required to locate information and prepare an assessment, according to Finextra.

A separate example in financial-crime investigations

FIS announced in May that it is developing a Financial Crimes AI Agent with Anthropic for anti-money-laundering investigations. FIS says the proposed tool will assemble evidence from core banking systems, assess activity against known typologies and flag higher-risk cases for investigator review. That is a narrower financial-crime workflow, rather than evidence that AI has resolved the wider task of regulatory-change management.

FIS said BMO and Amalgamated Bank were in development with the agent, with broader availability to its financial-institution clients planned for the second half of 2026. The company also said its architecture would keep client data in FIS-controlled infrastructure and make agent decisions traceable and auditable. These are company statements and future plans, not reported deployment results.

Controls remain part of the design

Any use of agents in a regulated institution also raises questions beyond speed. Blue Prism identifies data privacy, bias and fairness, transparency and explainability, cybersecurity, and accountability as risk areas. Those are vendor-authored considerations, but they illustrate why institutions would need governance around data access, the reasoning presented to reviewers and the actions an agent can take.

Finextra's webinar is set to cover integration into compliance workflows, relevant business functions and the end-to-end process following a regulatory change. It is an event preview, and no outcomes from the discussion have yet been reported.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.