Lyzr founder Siva Surendira presents at the 2025 Fintech Innovation Lab Demo Day. Melinda Huspen/American Banker

The next wave of artificial intelligence is reimagining business, with fintech startups developing products to ease workflow and back-office processes and helping financial institutions manage compliance and security.

As banks and fintechs are looking to agentic AI to solve pain points or automate their workflows, the latest crop of fintech startups in the Fintech Innovation Lab are working to build those tools.

“Almost all of this year’s class, selected by our financial services partners, are using AI to improve internal operations, technology, deployment, data usage, compliance and security,” said Maria Gotsch , president of the Partnership Fund for New York City. “They represent the next frontier in New York’s fintech sector, which is becoming the epicenter for the application of AI within financial services.”

New York has emerged as a global leader in fintech investment, with 30% of investment in 2024 going to firms headquartered in the city. According to research from JPMorgan Chase’s workplace solutions unit, New York fintechs snapped up $5.6 billion of the $18.8 billion invested that year.

One of the startups showcased in New York, Lyzr , is offering users both pre-built AI agents for banking jobs such as refund management, regulatory monitoring and teller assistance. If one of Lyzr’s pre-built agents isn’t a good fit for a bank, the fintech offers a platform called Agent Studio for firms to build customized agents on their own without having to write the code. Lyzr also embedded responsibility and hallucination management modules within its core agent-building platform to bolster AI agent effectiveness.

Another featured fintech, AnChain.AI , monitors blockchain and cryptocurrency transactions for potential fraud or money laundering using agentic AI software. Currently used for financial crime investigations by regulatory agencies such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Securities and Exchange Commission, AnChain.AI is expanding to the broader financial services market so banks can monitor their own transactions for AML compliance.

The Fintech Innovation Lab is an annual 12-week accelerator program founded and run by Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City. This year, BNY’s Manhattan office hosted the Fintech Innovation Lab’s in-person presentations and demonstrations. The fintechs presented their solutions to investors and executives across the financial services industry as a “graduation” from the program.

“The nature of the kinds of fintech participants in this demo day have kind of evolved over time, and today it’s almost uniquely focused on AI and agentic AI,” Marianna Lopert-Schaye, global head of Strategic Partnerships, Investments & Innovation at BNY , told American Banker. “It’s a core focus of innovation for most of the banking and financial services industry in New York. It’s not surprising to me that the selection process has really been looking for who are some of the most innovative, relevant startups in that space.”

Accenture , one of the primary sponsors of the accelerator, focused on bringing agentic AI startups into this year’s cohort to help banks narrow their focus in searching for AI partners.

“We really believe that, based on our research, generative AI has the potential to transform the financial services industry more than any other industry,” said Leo Framil, Accenture’s U.S. client lead for financial services. “We are in a very important moment for the industry, and the winners will be the institutions that are able to understand, implement and scale AI innovation.”