Adverse media screening, with the articles behind every score.

A sanctions list is a record of a decision somebody has already taken. The indictment, the regulator's fine, the collapsed deal and the reporting around all three usually arrive first, and for a great many subjects they arrive instead. Screening a name against every list at once will not surface any of it, because none of it is on a list. That is what adverse media screening is for, and it is now part of the service.

What it does

You give it a name and, optionally, a line of context: an employer, a country, a role. It searches open news and web sources, then reads every article that comes back and works out what part your subject actually plays in it. What you get is a risk score out of 100, a band, a sentence on what the coverage shows, the predicate offences it points to, and the articles themselves underneath. Every number can be opened up and traced to the reporting that produced it.

Context is optional and does most of the work on common names. Screening a Maria Gonzalez with nothing else to go on returns coverage of several different people; adding “Venezuela state bank” steers the search at the right one without throwing anything away outright.

Where it fits

The obvious moment is enhanced due diligence at onboarding, where a customer has come back clean on the lists and you still have to satisfy yourself about them. It is equally useful on periodic review of a book you already hold, on the counterparty to a transaction that does not look like the others, and on suppliers and intermediaries who never go through customer onboarding at all.

It does not replace a name check, and it is not a smaller version of one. A sanctions match is a matter of record: an authority has designated somebody and published it. An adverse media score is a judgement formed about open reporting. The two answer different questions and the second is never a substitute for the first.

How to read a score

Seventy and above means a conviction, indictment or sanction is attributed to the subject. Forty to sixty-nine means charges or a live investigation. Anything below that is allegations, civil matters and minor regulatory business. The score follows the single most serious finding and is nudged up when independent publications carry it. It is deliberately not a tally, because ten copies of the same wire story should not outrank one conviction.

One distinction matters more than any of the numbers. A score of zero means the subject was screened and nothing in the reviewed articles implicates them. Not assessed, shown as a dash rather than a number, means the articles could not be reviewed at all. The second is not a clean result, and the screening says so plainly instead of presenting it as one.

Two things are worth holding on to besides. The review reads headlines and extracts, which is enough to tell a defendant from a prosecutor and not enough to adjudicate a complicated case. And a screening is a point in time: it runs against live search, so the same name next month can legitimately come back differently. The score is there to decide what gets looked at, not to decide anything on its own.

Getting to it

Unlike a name check, this is not part of the free search on this site. It is not reading a list; it is running a search and a review for each name, so it is metered. It runs from the dashboard, where account holders open Adverse Media, enter a name and a context, choose how many articles to review, and read the result on the page. Every run is logged like any other call, so it turns up in usage history under adverse media with its score and its articles intact, which is what makes it reviewable months later.

The same screening runs over the API, so it can sit inside your own onboarding rather than being a thing somebody remembers to do; there is a second endpoint that returns the articles unscored, for anyone who intends to classify them themselves. The request shape, the full response and worked examples are on the adverse media reference. If you do not have an account yet, get in touch and we will set one up.

The adverse media coverage page sets out every field an article comes back with, and what a score does and does not amount to.