• Agentic AI company Arva AI has launched its Research Lab, a new division dedicated to building models and infrastructure to enable financial institutions to automate high-risk decisions.
• The Lab has produced proprietary models for data enrichment, transaction analysis, and evidence-based reasoning, and infrastructure—AgentCore—that turns analyst insights into backtested, versioned system improvements.
• Founded in 2024, Arva AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026 in London.

Arva AI, a fintech startup that leverages agentic AI to enhance business verification, announced the launch of its Research Lab. The lab is a new research division within the firm dedicated to building the models and infrastructure that enable banks to automate high-risk decisions. After more than 5,000 hours of research, training, and evaluation, the Lab has produced proprietary models for data enrichment, transaction analysis, and evidence-based reasoning. The Lab has also built infrastructure—AgentCore—that transforms analyst corrections, insights, and case outcomes into system improvements that are backtested, evaluated, and versioned before they reach a live decision.

Arva’s first model, Arva Intel, was developed to research suspicious individuals and businesses online. Evaluated independently against frontier models, Arva Intel outperformed general-purpose models by 13% on precision. The model was benchmarked not solely on the final case outcome but on the accuracy of each component inside it.

“Banks keep humans in the loop because no AI has been accurate enough to remove them safely—that’s the problem the Lab solves,” Arva AI Founder and CEO Rhim Shah said. “Our models and AgentCore let us automate these decisions with the accuracy and control banks require, and this is just the start.”

The launch of Arva’s Research Lab comes at a time when financial institutions are exploring ways to use AI to help them manage and review financial crime and fraud cases, as well as other back-office operations where cumbersome manual review by large teams can expose firms to financial losses, customer harm, or regulatory breach. As such, having a human-in-the-loop has become a requirement with many AI deployments. Unfortunately, while general purpose models can provide some assistance to human analysts, they remain too inconsistent and inaccurate for high-stakes automation.

“We built the Lab to close that gap,” the company noted on its LinkedIn page. “Proprietary decisioning models purpose-built for the highest-risk parts of a decision, and AgentCore, infrastructure that turns analyst corrections and case outcomes into tested, versioned system improvements. These are already live in production with leading financial institutions and we’re excited to finally be talking about it publicly.”

Financial crime and fraud are the initial focus for the Lab. Over time, Arva anticipates that the Lab will expand into payment exceptions, disputes, and other customer-related investigations. Arva added that it plans to publish its benchmark methodology and research at academic venues soon, as well.

Arva AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026 in London. Founded in 2024, the company is backed by Google’s Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and other leading funds.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

• Financial crime prevention company Arva AI has teamed up with FairPlay, an AI enablement company for financial services.
• The partnership calls for FairPlay to use its Agentic Assurance Platform to validate the effectiveness and safety of Arva’s AI agents for AML and KYC use cases.
• Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Arva made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2025.

Financial crime prevention technology company Arva AI has announced a partnership with AI enablement company for financial services, FairPlay. The partnership will enable FairPlay to validate the effectiveness and safety of Arva’s agentic AI solution for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Business (KYB) use cases using its FairPlay Agentic Assurance Platform.

“Financial institutions need assurance that their AI systems are not only powerful, but also safe, reliable, and regulator-ready,” FairPlay Founder and CEO Kareem Saleh said. “By partnering with Arva, we’re helping the industry deploy tested and trusted agents that can stand up to both business demands and compliance scrutiny.”

FairPlay’s Agentic Assurance Platform will provide scenario-based stress testing that uses realistic, multi-turn conversations and workflows to uncover hidden vulnerabilities. The platform has a control mapping engine that links observed risks to compensating controls such as prompt optimization, output filtering, and rollback options. Additionally, the solution features auto-generating documentation that is aligned with SR 11-7 model risk management guidance, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and emerging ISO standards.

Arva’s partnership with FairPlay comes at a time when a growing number of banks and financial services companies are seeing agentic AI as “the antidote to KYC/AML headwinds,” according to an August report from McKinsey. Noting that banks often “assign up to 10 to 15 percent of their full-time equivalents to KYC/AML alone,” the report observes that agentic AI provides a “paradigm shift” compared to other AI technologies. This includes productivity gains of 200 to 2,000 percent, according to McKinsey, as well as “a substantial positive impact on the quality and consistency of output.”

“At Arva, our mission is to transform financial crime prevention with cutting-edge AI,” Arva Founder and CEO Rahim Shah said. “FairPlay’s Agentic Assurance Platform provides the rigorous testing and evidence generation our customers need to trust and scale these technologies with confidence.”

Arva made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2025. At the event, the company demonstrated its business verification solution that leverages AI agents to enhance compliance, accelerate review, and cut operational costs. Arva processes more than 100,000 alerts a month and notes that companies deploying its technology have seen an increase of more than 40% in straight through processing, with as many as 92% of reviews handled by the AI. Founded in 2024, Arva is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Arva began 2025 securing $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Google’s Gradient fund and featured participation from Y Combinator, Amino Capital, and Olive Tree Capital.

Photo by Joonyeop Baek on Unsplash