Scaling Smarter: Jack Henry’s New Age of AI-powered Financial Crime Defense

Financial institutions today operate in a pressure cooker. In addition to escalating fraud threats, they’re also faced with evolving regulatory demands and account holder expectations that everything will work instantly and seamlessly. To protect their customers, banks need more than incremental updates to legacy systems; they need risk infrastructure that’s intelligent, adaptable, and built for speed.

Jack Henry™, a trusted core banking and payments technology provider to community and regional financial institutions across the US, saw this shift coming. With hundreds of financial institutions relying on its technology, the company needed a solution that could scale across diverse use cases while delivering real-time protection using advanced AI and machine learning technology. 

In launching Jack Henry Financial Crimes Defender™, a platform purpose-built to fight both fraud and money laundering at network scale, Jack Henry partnered with Feedzai to take fraud prevention and AML compliance to the next level.

Read on to discover how this collaboration significantly alters the way financial institutions approach risk.

Key Takeaways

• Jack Henry Financial Crimes Defender is a platform designed to prevent real-time fraud and money laundering using AI, machine learning, advanced rules, and analytics to identify issues across its customer network.
• The solution offers rapid deployment to meet regulatory requirements and enables continuous evolution to address emerging risks.
• The collaboration between Jack Henry and Feedzai has been instrumental in delivering this future-ready solution. 

The Challenge: Evolving Risks and Growing Scale

Financial institutions aren’t just updating old systems. They’re rethinking how to fight financial crime in an environment that moves faster and hits harder than ever. Jack Henry, serving more than 1,600 financial institutions, recognized that patchwork solutions and legacy vendors couldn’t keep up with the scale or speed of modern threats. The company wanted to design a platform that could:

• Deliver real-time fraud and AML detection.
• Adapt to diverse regulatory environments.
• Simplify risk operations across its client network. 

That urgency led to a strategic partnership with Feedzai. The result is Jack Henry Financial Crimes Defender, an AI-native platform designed from the ground up to deliver fast, flexible, and scalable financial crime prevention. To date, more than 120 financial institutions have been onboarded to Jack Henry Defender, demonstrating its ability to meet the diverse needs of various financial organizations and ease of implementation.

Upgrading Fraud Prevention and AML Compliance

Jack Henry Defender leverages enhanced rules and strategies that have achieved superior fraud detection capabilities, utilizing advanced analytics, machine learning algorithms, rules, and expert knowledge to identify and prevent a wide range of fraud types. 

Defender uses machine learning not only to detect fraud across individual accounts, but also to uncover network-level patterns. This is essential for real-time detection in instant payment environments like Zelle (and traditional payment methods like ACH, paper checks, and wire transfers).

The solution measures patterns at scale across the various organizations, accounts, payment types, and devices within Jack Henry’s customer network. Analyzing fraud patterns across the network delivers more precise detection rates than analyzing only a single FI’s transactions. 

Protecting P2P Payments

Payment apps like Zelle make it convenient for customers to send money with just a few taps on a smartphone. For financial institutions, integrating Zelle into their own apps prevents customers from switching to an alternative P2P app. It’s also a powerful tool for remaining competitive and earning loyalty in the digital age.

However, this convenience also opens the doors to fraud. The real-time nature of P2P transactions makes them a prime target for fraud, and the losses are immediate. Scammers are skilled at using social engineering tactics to deceive customers, blurring the lines between legitimate transfers and scams. Regulatory pressures may change, but banks always need to protect their customers. Especially since some customers are reluctant to use P2P services out of fear of losing money with little or no recourse.

This is where solutions like Jack Henry Defender become essential. Defender uses Feedzai’s advanced AI to analyze Zelle transactions, providing real-time, network-wide scam detection. By helping banks distinguish between trusted transfers and scams, it makes instant payments safer, builds trust, and encourages more people to use them.

Trustworthy Compliance

Jack Henry Defender enables financial institutions to address their BSA/AML compliance requirements confidently and efficiently. This runs from detection of suspicious behavior through investigation and regulatory reporting. Using a combination of industry-standard AML typologies, a flexible analytics platform, risk-based prioritization, and transparent evidence, it can be deployed quickly to meet regulatory requirements. It also allows for continuous evolution and proactive response to emerging risks.

Streamlined Operations

The platform streamlines operations by automating many manual tasks and workflows associated with financial crime investigations, such as alert triage, case management, and reporting. This not only improves efficiency, but also reduces the risk of human error. Additionally, Jack Henry Defender employs intelligent decision-making algorithms to prioritize alerts and provides white-box explanations to guide investigators, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively.

Accelerated Time to Market

With advanced machine learning capabilities and comprehensive rules, the platform enables rapid innovation and quick deployment of new features to address emerging threats and evolving regulations. Through a seamless integration with Feedzai, financial institutions can easily plug into Defender, ensuring they get the most advanced capabilities right out of the gate. Its agility ensures financial institutions can pivot quickly to prevent fraud and adapt to the latest compliance requirements.

The Results So Far

The collaboration between Jack Henry and Feedzai is already yielding strong outcomes.

• Measurable reduction in manual triage through automation.
• Overall alert rates less than 1% with meaningful alerts in fraud mitigation. This represents roughly an 80% reduction in alerts sent to Jack Henry’s FIs.
• Flexible compliance workflows that scale across jurisdictions.

“Jack Henry’s partnership with Feedzai has taken our fraud prevention efforts to new heights,” said Rene Perez, Director of Financial Crimes Sales & Strategy for Jack Henry. “The strong bond between the teams continues to shape a product that’s both effective and forward-looking.”

Key Elements of a Future-Ready Risk Strategy

Jack Henry’s approach highlights several critical components of a modern risk strategy:

• Real-Time, Network-Level Detection: In today’s environment, focusing solely on individual account activity is no longer sufficient. Effective fraud prevention requires a broader view, analyzing patterns across the entire financial ecosystem. This is particularly crucial for fast-moving payment systems like Zelle and FedNow, where transactions occur in seconds, and losses can mount rapidly.

• Vendor Orchestration at Scale: Many financial institutions grapple with the complexity of managing a multitude of data vendors. Jack Henry’s strategy focused on streamlining access and monitoring through a single API, simplifying risk management across a complex vendor landscape (80+ data providers).

• Built-in Agility: Recognizing the diverse needs of its client base, Jack Henry prioritized configurability. The platform’s rules and workflows were tailored to each institution’s specific requirements, enabling them to meet compliance mandates without sacrificing speed or operational efficiency.

“Our focus has always been on helping financial institutions adapt to a constantly shifting risk landscape. This collaboration was about enabling that adaptability at scale while staying grounded in what matters most—protecting customers.”
— Phong Rock, EVP Global Strategy & Growth, Feedzai

What This Means for the Industry

The Jack Henry Defender story offers a valuable takeaway for risk and compliance leaders: future-ready platforms aren’t about more tools. They’re about orchestration. About visibility. About systems that evolve with the threat landscape.

As new threats emerge and payment systems evolve, Jack Henry Defender is positioned to adapt quickly—with ongoing enhancements and new use cases already in motion, including digital signal integration and advanced model development. The success of this partnership highlights how financial institutions and technology providers can work together to meet the future of financial crime with confidence and clarity.

In a world where financial crime never stands still, neither can your strategy.

Additional Resources

• Blog: From Black Box to Agentic AI: Reflecting on AI’s Adoption and Maturity
• Report: 2025 AI Trends in Fraud and Financial Crime Prevention
• Commentary: Feedzai’s Acquisition of Demyst Is a Modern Response to Today’s Fraud
• Solution: AI That Goes Beyond the Ordinary