- 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
