There is no shortage of regulatory guidance on adverse media screening. FATF Recommendation 10 sets the risk-based foundation. The EU’s AMLD6 and forthcoming AMLR raise the bar on continuous monitoring. The FCA, FinCEN, MAS, HKMA and FINMA each publish their own thematic reviews and expectations. Most compliance teams are not short of guidance.

Most financial institutions have a source of wealth policy. Far fewer have a source of wealth process. The difference matters more than practitioners sometimes acknowledge — and it is precisely where regulatory findings live.

It is well known that ‘adverse media’ screening is the process of searching for negative news and other data sources about an individual or company for due diligence purposes.

Adverse media screening sits at the intersection of two pressures that have grown sharply in the last three years — the regulator’s expectation that financial institutions and other industries will see what they should have seen, and the analyst’s practical reality of doing so across millions of articles, in dozens of languages, every day.

Every source of wealth assessment stands or falls on the quality of its evidence. Collecting the right documents — specific to each client’s wealth category, structured to meet the regulator’s evidential standard, and independently corroborated rather than simply filed — is what separates a defensible compliance record from one that fails under scrutiny.

Every source of wealth review is, at its core, a risk identification exercise. The documents tell one story. The red flags tell you whether to believe it.

Politically exposed persons represent the highest-risk client category in AML compliance — and, for many private banks, among the most commercially attractive. Managing that tension is one of the defining operational challenges in compliance today. At the heart of it sits source of wealth verification.

As financial crime risks intensify and regulators demand proof over policy, 2026 is set to be a defining year for KYC. Signals from FATF, the FCA and the EBA point to deeper scrutiny of onboarding quality, beneficial ownership, governance and the effective use of technology across the customer lifecycle.

The UK legal profession is entering a very different era of anti-money laundering (AML) regulation. With the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) becoming the sole AML and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) regulator for professional legal services replacing the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), law firms will soon be held to the same expectations that banks have lived with for years.

In the evolving landscape of compliance, financial institutions, regulated businesses and large corporations face mounting pressure to streamline Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, meet anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, and manage third-party risk efficiently.

In the modern complex regulatory environment, Know Your Customer (KYC) screening is a cornerstone of compliance for financial institutions, corporations, and regulated industries.