Today, adverse media, watchlists, and other Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), all play a role in shaping how organisations screen and monitor their clients, suppliers, and third parties. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Generative AI (GenAI), the landscape is becoming more powerful, but also more complex.
In this article, we’ll explore the key differences between screening and monitoring, the role of OSINT, and why the most resilient compliance programmes combine both solutions to protect against evolving financial crime, reputational damage, and regulatory exposure.
What Is Screening?
Screening is the process of performing checks on an individual or entity at a specific point in time, most commonly during onboarding, periodic reviews, or pre-transaction due diligence.
These checks typically involve comparing names against:
- Sanctions and watchlists (e.g., OFAC, UN, EU, HMT)
- Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) lists
- Adverse media
- Corporate registries and beneficial ownership databases
- Other OSINT sources
Screening is static, it’s a snapshot of past risk at a moment in time. It helps determine whether an entity should be allowed into the business relationship and whether enhanced due diligence (EDD) is warranted.
What Is Monitoring?
Monitoring, on the other hand, is dynamic and continuous. It involves ongoing surveillance of your clients, suppliers, or employees to detect any new risks as they emerge. Examples include:
- New adverse media coverage
- Changes in sanctions status
- Legal issues such as court rulings or bankruptcy
- ESG controversies or reputational red flags
Monitoring is the cornerstone of pKYC (perpetual KYC), a growing expectation from regulators, particularly in high-risk industries such as private banking, wealth management, and cross-border trade.
Screening and monitoring are complementary. Screening clears an individual or entity at a moment in time, while monitoring ensures they stay cleared over time.
Adverse Media, Watchlists and other OSINT: Feeding the Screening-Monitoring Cycle
Modern compliance teams increasingly rely on OSINT to augment traditional data sources, including:
- Adverse media: news articles, blogs, investigative journalism
- Public records: court documents, corporate filings, regulatory updates
- Online footprints: social media, forums, grey literature
While some OSINT can be structured like a watchlist, over 80% is unstructured, such as online media for instance. Online media can be multilingual and is published on a continuous basis, which is why AI and NLP are essential to make sense of it all.
Adverse media screening, in particular, is a regulatory expectation from bodies like the FATF, FCA, and EBA. It’s often the only way to catch red flags before they appear on a formal list or database.
AI, NLP and GenAI: Enabling Smarter Screening and Monitoring
Screening and monitoring have traditionally been labour-intensive and error-prone, with compliance teams overwhelmed by false positives, duplicate hits and irrelevant results.
Enter AI, NLP, and now GenAI. These technologies transform the screening-monitoring lifecycle by:
- Extracting risk-relevant facts from huge volumes of data
- Disambiguating identities (e.g., distinguishing “John Smith” the lawyer from “John Smith” the criminal)
- Summarising risk content at different levels (e.g., legal, ESG, reputational)
- Flagging changes in real time, with multilingual capabilities
AI enables you to screen faster, monitor continuously, and act decisively, while keeping human expertise focused on high-risk, high-impact cases.
Profile Enrichment Through Monitoring
Monitoring is also a powerful tool for profile enrichment. As new information surfaces, profiles can evolve, shedding light on:
- New directorships or business affiliations
- Shifts in geographic or sectoral exposure
- ESG violations or reputational events
- New barographic and firmographic information
This enrichment enhances the accuracy of future screening, helping reduce false positives and improve decision confidence.
Why You Need Both Screening and Monitoring
Think of screening as your first line of defence, and monitoring as your early warning system.
Benefits of Screening:
- Compliant onboarding decisions
- Robust client risk profiling
- Alignment with AML regulations
- Ability to tailor checks to different risk categories
Benefits of Monitoring:
- Proactive detection of emerging risks
- Satisfy pKYC requirements
- Reduce exposure to reputational damage
- Detect changes in client profile or behaviour
When Combined:
A dual approach ensures you’re not just performing compliance at onboarding, but you’re maintaining compliance across the full lifecycle of the relationship.
Without monitoring, you might screen a client once and never realise they were:
- Sanctioned two weeks later
- Exposed in an ESG scandal
- Sued for fraud in a new jurisdiction
- Implicated in political controversy
By the time you find out, it may be too late. Over time, smarter monitoring makes for smarter screening.
Use Case: A Private Bank’s Client Turns Politically Exposed
Imagine a private bank onboards a high-net-worth individual. At the time of screening, there are no red flags. Six months later, this individual’s spouse is appointed to a high-ranking government position. Now, the client is indirectly politically exposed.
Without continuous monitoring, the bank may not realise this. But with an AI-powered adverse media and watchlist monitoring system in place, the change would be flagged automatically, enabling the bank to reassess the risk and meet its obligations under AML regulations.
Don’t Choose Between Screening and Monitoring: Combine Them
Screening and monitoring are two sides of the same compliance coin. You need both to:
- Prevent onboarding risky clients or partners
- Detect changes in real time
- Meet global KYC, AML and ESG expectations
- Stay compliant across client lifecycles
- Avoid regulatory penalties and reputational harm
With AI, NLP, and GenAI, the right platform will do it all at scale, in multiple languages, across structured and unstructured data.
Whether you’re a private bank, regulated financial institution, or global corporate, the future of due diligence lies in unified screening and monitoring, powered by intelligent automation and rooted in anonymity and auditability.
About smartKYC
smartKYC is the leading provider of AI-driven KYC risk screening solutions, serving financial institutions and multinational corporations worldwide. By combining artificial intelligence, linguistic and cultural sensitivity, and deep domain knowledge, smartKYC sets new standards for KYC quality, transforms productivity, and ensures compliance conformance.
To see smartKYC in action, please schedule a demo.
