Adverse media screening

Searching news for damaging coverage about a customer.

Before or after taking on a customer, a business looks for news stories that link the person or company to fraud, corruption, or other crimes.

Structured screening of media sources for negative-news events mapped to risk typologies. A risk typology is a named category of risk, such as fraud, bribery, or terrorist financing, that the screening tags each story with.

Adverse media screening typically works like this:

1. The system searches a large set of news and public sources for a customer's name and related details.
2. It scores how likely each hit is to be about the same person or company.
3. It tags relevant stories with the type of risk they describe.
4. An analyst reviews the hits and decides whether they change the customer's risk rating.

The hits are usually sorted by what they describe:

• Financial crime, such as fraud, bribery, and money laundering.
• Serious crime, such as organized crime and trafficking.
• Regulatory or legal action, such as sanctions, charges, and enforcement actions.
• Reputational issues, such as allegations that stop short of formal charges.

The approach has challenges:

• Name matches, since many people share a name and a story may be about someone else.
• Source quality, since reports vary in reliability.
• Volume, since a search can return many results that need review.

Adverse media screening sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Politically exposed person (PEP) screening checks for public roles, while adverse media checks for negative news about anyone.
• Enhanced due diligence (EDD) is the deeper review that serious adverse media can trigger.
• Ongoing monitoring repeats screening over time to catch new coverage.