ENGAGE 2026 returns to New York on April 27–28, bringing together a dense mix of financial institutions, compliance leaders, and technology specialists at the Sheraton Times Square Hotel. The event, organized by NICE Actimize, is shaping up as one of the more focused industry gatherings this year, with a clear emphasis on how artificial intelligence is reshaping fraud prevention, anti-money laundering operations, and broader financial crime risk management.
More than 200 companies and over 700 executives are expected to attend, which gives the event a certain density—you get decision-makers, not just observers. The structure leans heavily into real-world application: live demos, case-driven sessions, and a steady flow of discussions around operational challenges that institutions are actually dealing with right now. It’s less theoretical, more “this is what’s breaking and here’s how people are trying to fix it,” which tends to be where these events become useful.
The opening keynote comes from Craig Costigan, who is set to focus on agentic AI and its role in redefining fraud and financial crime prevention workflows. That idea—systems that don’t just assist but actively operate within investigations—is quietly becoming the center of the conversation across the industry. Following him, Gary Gensler brings a regulatory and macro perspective, tying together finance, compliance, and the accelerating pace of technological change. Day two opens with Walter Pasquarelli, whose keynote looks at the intersection of AI, organized crime, and synthetic threats, a topic that feels increasingly less futuristic and more immediate.
The agenda spreads across a range of sessions that reflect current pressure points: adaptive transaction monitoring, AML transformation, the scaling of scam and payment fraud ecosystems, and the breakdown of traditional organizational silos. There’s also a noticeable focus on identity and trust in what’s being framed as the deepfake era—basically the growing problem that the evidence institutions rely on is becoming easier to fabricate.
Roundtables push things into more practical territory, covering AI deployment in fraud prevention, beneficial ownership gaps, AI-centric AML concerns, and agentic investigation models. These tend to be smaller, more candid discussions, and often where the more interesting insights surface—people are usually a bit more honest in those settings, sometimes unexpectedly so.
Beyond the vendor and institutional angle, the event includes input from law enforcement and analysts, adding perspective on emerging threats, SAR expectations, and public-private coordination. It rounds out the picture a bit, making it less about tools and more about the ecosystem that surrounds financial crime detection and response.
Across the two days, ENGAGE 2026 reads like a snapshot of an industry in transition. The shift toward AI-driven operations is no longer framed as optional or experimental—it’s being treated as necessary, even if the path to getting there still looks uneven depending on the institution. That tension, between urgency and readiness, is probably what will define most of the conversations in the rooms, and maybe in the hallways too.