Craig Costigan

Craig Costigan runs one of the best-known names in a corner of software most people never see: the systems banks use to spot money laundering, fraud and market manipulation before it does damage. As CEO of NICE Actimize since 2018, he sits at the top of a business that sells to financial institutions around the world, and he got there by staying close to one hard problem for a very long time.

That problem is financial crime, and the technology built to fight it. Costigan's path started in 1992, when he became a founding partner and president of K-Tek International, a young software company serving the securities finance industry. It was a niche, technical corner of capital markets, but the firm grew into a recognized name and was acquired by Loanet in 1996. The lesson stuck: pick a specialized market where the plumbing matters, and go deep.

From there Costigan moved into larger companies without changing lanes. Around 2001 he joined SunGard as a senior executive leading its international securities finance business. He rose to President of Risk, Compliance and Global Securities, a division that NICE describes as a $650 million operation with more than 2,000 staff, delivering front, middle and back-office systems to major banks and broker dealers. The work was the same shape as before, just at a bigger scale.

Then came FIS, one of the largest financial technology firms in the world. There Costigan served as President of Capital Markets & Credit, a $1.1 billion segment where he managed roughly 4,000 employees globally. His remit covered risk, compliance, credit, securities finance, securities processing and market data, serving thousands of banks, broker dealers, investment firms, hedge funds and insurers. By the time he left, he had run large teams, large budgets and large product portfolios, all pointed at the same set of customers.

In 2018 he took over as CEO of NICE Actimize, the financial crime and compliance division of NICE. The role put him in charge of market strategy and vision, and gave him direct responsibility for sales, product, R&D, international services and marketing. NICE Actimize's customers are the compliance and fraud teams inside financial institutions, the people who have to file suspicious activity reports, screen transactions against sanctions lists and keep pace with regulators. Costigan's job is to make sure the software stays ahead of criminals who never stop adapting.

Lately that has meant one thing above all: artificial intelligence. Under Costigan, NICE Actimize moved early and hard into generative AI. In 2024 the company launched a set of generative AI solutions for financial crime and compliance investigations, including a tool that helps draft Suspicious Activity Reports, one of the most time-consuming tasks in a compliance analyst's day. The pitch was simple. If a machine can pull together the facts and write the first draft, human investigators spend less time on paperwork and more on judgment.

By 2025 the story had moved from generative to agentic AI, software agents that can carry out multi-step investigative work with less hand-holding. NICE Actimize added agentic AI capabilities to its financial crime prevention platform, framing them as a way for institutions to scale operations and cut cost and labor. It is a bet on where the whole category is heading, and Costigan has put the company's marketing muscle and R&D behind it.

That bet shows up most clearly at ENGAGE, the company's industry conference. Costigan's opening keynotes have become a kind of annual thesis statement. For ENGAGE 2026, his address centers on the impact of agentic AI on financial institutions and what he calls a new era of fraud and financial crime prevention. It is the same message he has carried for years, updated for the current technology: the tools have to evolve as fast as the threats.

Ask Costigan how he thinks about the job and the answer is less about algorithms than about people. "Front and center to me each day is being focused on teamwork and collaboration to produce value and innovative solutions for our clients, protecting their business and accelerating growth strategies globally," he has said. For a company whose product is trust, that framing is telling. The software matters, but so does the team that keeps it credible.

There is a quiet consistency to the whole arc. Costigan studied economics at Northeastern University, not computer science, yet spent his career running software businesses. He never chased the flashiest sector of the moment. He stayed inside capital markets and financial technology for more than thirty years, moving up through K-Tek, SunGard, FIS and now NICE Actimize, accumulating operating experience one segment at a time. It is not a loud story. But it put him in charge of systems that thousands of financial institutions depend on to keep criminals out.