Bretton AI with Will Lawrence | E453
Bringing agents to financial fraud detection.
In this episode of FinTech Impact, host Jason Pereira sits down with Will Lawrence, co-founder and CEO of Bretton AI, where he’s building agents to help banks catch fraud and streamline compliance. Will shares how the idea took shape back at Meta Payments, where he led risk and compliance products and realized that sharp detection systems were just piling on repetitive follow-up work for investigators. He walks through how AI agents have evolved—from basic step-by-step prompts to reasoning models, and finally to tool-driven agents that can manage long, complex workflows. That momentum is already reflected in the numbers: Bretton has now run over five million investigations.
Will breaks down what actually makes a “harness” work in practice: solid baseline instructions and guardrails with full citations and audit trails, paired with tools, performance checks, and memory that adapts to regulatory nuance. The conversation also tackles why banks are finally moving fast on AI, pointing to mounting costs, heavier regulations, industry consolidation, and fierce competition, while unpacking how those pressures play out differently at large versus small institutions. They wrap up by touching on the everyday friction of rolling out agents in established teams, and how Bretton is shifting from a fraud-focused tool into a wider platform for any regulated back-office job.
Episode Highlights:
00:00 Welcome to Fintech Impact
00:38 Meet Bretton AI
01:04 Origin Story at Meta
02:24 Why Agents Beat Humans
03:31 Three Eras of Agents
06:15 Roles vs Skills Debate
09:05 Domain-Specific Harness
13:57 Selling Banks on AI
16:52 Big Banks Move Fast
18:21 Jobs Fear and Adoption
20:37 Platform Expansion Vision
22:34 Rapid Fire Closing Questions
25:23 Final Thanks and Wrap
25:45 Outro and Sponsor
Resources:
Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook
LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn
Woodgate.com – Sponsor
LinkedIn - Will Lawrence’s LinkedIn