The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that artificial intelligence has been blamed for supercharging fraud, but the technology is also helping financial institutions fight financial crime. The Globe's Alexandra Posadzki writes that Nasdaq Verafin is one such company harnessing AI to help banks and other financial institutions automate the more repetitive, burdensome aspects of financial-crime compliance. One of its AI agents helps banks ensure they aren't facilitating transactions with sanctioned entities; another helps them perform what's known as enhanced due diligence on high-risk customers such as "politically exposed persons." The financial crime management company, which was founded in 2003 in St. John's and acquired by Nasdaq Inc. in 2021 for $2.75-billion (U.S.), is launching two new AI agents. One will help financial institutions triage anti-money-laundering alerts, while the other is geared toward combatting fraud. The idea is not to replace human investigators, but to free them up to focus on more complex, high-value investigations. Criminals tend to be early adopters of new technologies, are currently out ahead in the AI arms race, but financial institutions are working hard to catch up.