Adverse media screening enables financial institutions to adopt a risk-based approach to AML compliance, focusing resources on higher-risk entities, and geographic regions. By tailoring screening parameters and intensity based on risk assessments and regulatory requirements, financial institutions can allocate resources more effectively and prioritize efforts where the greatest risks lie. From a regulatory perspective, adverse media screening is becoming increasingly critical. Regulatory bodies around the world are progressively emphasizing the need for businesses to go beyond traditional AML measures and actively seek out potential risks in their client and partner bases. Adverse media screening is a key part of this proactive approach, helping to ensure that organizations stay compliant with evolving regulatory standards and expectations.
By integrating adverse media screening into AML processes, you can enhance your due diligence efforts, better manage risk profiles, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
One of the primary issues is the data – it must be trustworthy and manageable. You should screen against reliable, unbiased sources that represent global news, but such good coverage leads to a large volume of structured and unstructured data to be scanned. This vast amount of data can lead to both false positives and false negatives, making it difficult to accurately assess risk. Additionally, the constantly evolving nature of news and media, coupled with the global and multilingual scope of the internet, adds another layer of complexity.
Often, news stories are reported without specific personal data like date of birth or address, which leads to potential ambiguity in identity verification. Additionally, variations in media reporting styles, sources, and privacy laws may result in a name being presented differently than how your organization collected it during the onboarding process.
Moody's adverse media screening solution helps our customers identify potential risks associated with their business partners by screening massive amounts of data for negative news or information. It leverages advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence and natural language processing, to analyze and interpret media content in real time or from archives.
Our team actively monitors a vast list of news sources and continuously updates our coverage to ensure that our customers receive valuable insight. We provide a comprehensive and diverse range of media content and we are committed to ensuring that our coverage remains unbiased and representative of the global adverse media landscape.
Using risk code filtering and threshold settings that align with each customer’s risk tolerance, we help our customers with a well-defined search strategy to avoid an overwhelming number of results.
We deploy natural language processing (NLP) to identify the language of submitted names, whether submitted in Latin or another script, and to match against profiles with similar names within the corresponding language, so we can account for different naming conventions across the world.
Contact us to learn how you can automate adverse media screening when onboarding and monitoring customers.
Bad actors show up in the news well before they appear on any watchlist but monitoring for adverse media in a continuous news cycle can be labor intensive for compliance teams of any size. You can easily surface hidden risk pertaining to your customers and third parties by screening with our adverse media database, which include:
Harnessing our innovative technology and industry expertise, Moody’s automates accurate screening and swift onboarding of customers and third parties. We continue our support throughout the customer lifecycle by enabling the perpetual monitoring of counterparty risk across global business networks in near real-time. Our industry practice group stays up to date with the changing regulatory environment to ensure that our solutions can adapt while also keeping our clients updated so that they can proactively prepare for changes.
Moody’s is helping customers automate onboarding journeys in 197 countries, across 211 jurisdictions: completing 800M+ new customer and third-party checks each day on average in 2022, including screening against our database of 17M+ risk profiles, 446M+ entities, and 34K+ sanctioned entities.