Adverse Media Screening Solution

What is Adverse Media Screening?

When carrying out Know Your Customer (KYC) screening, a challenge many organizations face is developing a robust and thorough adverse media screening process.

Adverse media screening, also referred to as negative news screening, is the process of searching an individual or company for adverse news or media relating to them, which can be found in open-source intelligence online.

Limitations of Traditional Negative News Screening Tools

Traditional approaches to adverse media checks are no longer fit for purpose. Simply searching a name in proximity to a negative term is flawed:

• How can you be confident the adverse reference is about your client?
• Is the reference about your client but is actually benign when looked at in context?
• Is the reference referring to another company or person in the article?

Such approaches not only lack precision, but also intelligence:

• Are all of these articles saying the same thing, and what you know already?
• If they are, wouldn’t you rather be told first what you need to know rather than wade through each article?
• Can you have the same confidence in conducting adverse media screening checks in a foreign language as you do in your native language?

Benefits of smartKYC’s Adverse Media Screening Product

The shortcomings of traditional adverse media screening tools result in inefficiency, frustration and a lack of confidence in the work done. In contrast, smartKYC’s multilingual semantic search and media analysis platform results in faster, better and more cost-effective KYC:

Faster because:

• 1000s of news articles from all client-defined sources (e.g. web and media archives) are machine-read and analyzed for relevance in minutes, and always in real time.
• Factual intelligence is extracted from all the documents so that the KYC analyst can prioritise the facts first rather than having to read every document.
• Overnight batch processes can be run for larger volumes.

Better because:

• All negative news hits are scored for relevance based on a match with all identifying attributes, not just a name, thereby reducing false positives.
• Every potentially relevant document, from all sources, is read rather than only the first handful of results – nothing is missed and results are always live, never curated.
• smartKYC is an advanced multilingual tool. It is optimized language-by-language to give you the same confidence in Russian, Arabic and Traditional Chinese for example as in English or German. Language should never be a barrier when it comes to negative news screening.

More cost-effective because:

• Less human effort needs to be spent on laborious and time-consuming adverse media monitoring.
• Getting it ‘right first time’ will likely mean less requirement for expensive remediation exercises.
• Straight-through-processing aspirations, like robo-onboarding, become a reality.

Discover smartKYC

If you’re interested in learning more about smartKYC’s industry-leading multilingual NLP and how it can transform the efficiency and effectiveness of your KYC operations, book your demo today.

Frequently Asked Questions