Adverse media screening (aka ‘adverse media monitoring’) is one of the most effective tools that banks and other financial institutions (FIs) have for helping to manage and mitigate risk, particularly financial crime risk. When performed correctly, a robust adverse media monitoring process can have great impact, as you can see from our recent webinar, blog post and customer stories on the topic.
Performed properly, adverse media monitoring, followed by review of all negative media identified, can determine whether risk exists in conducting business with specific persons or companies. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) stresses the importance of adverse media screening as part of an enhanced due diligence (EDD) process. According to FATF, EDD should include “verifiable adverse media searches to inform the individual customer risk assessment.”
However, FIs face a major problem when they perform adverse media screening – their screening tools deliver so many alerts that compliance teams are routinely overwhelmed and lack the resources to adequately evaluate and adjudicate each alert. Simply put, there is too much noise. The noise from the screening tools reverberates in a cacophony of negative news alerts, most of which are “false positives” – alerts that fail to indicate risk. Having to review and make decisions around every one of these alerts makes compliance teams highly ineffective.
WorkFusion addresses the noise problem of adverse media monitoring in our newly released white paper, Removing the False Positives Noise from Adverse Media Monitoring. It’s a valuable read for AML (anti-money laundering) compliance leaders who want to rapidly scale and improve their adverse media alert reviews – without adding staff or outsourcing L1 analysts.
While the paper is a quick read, it offers an entirely new view into how to maximize the value of adverse media screening/monitoring and reach your end goal of mitigating risk faster, more effectively and more efficiently. It does so by focusing on alert adjudication on the back end, not adverse media screening on the front end. Certainly, it recognizes the need for screening/monitoring as the starting point to risk mitigation. But, unlike any other paper you will read on the topic, this one homes in on the “thinking” part of the process – evaluating alerts for risk and adjudicating them quickly and properly.
Once the paper grounds you in the differences between alerting and adjudication, it then demonstrates how to apply AI to perform the end-to-end process with maximum effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, it shows specific tools at work and how they easily integrate to make it all happen.
To learn how easy AI can transform your adverse media screening/monitoring process by incorporating intelligent alert adjudication to mitigate risk and optimize your L1 compliance analyst team’s work, download the white paper today.
To learn more about Evelyn, our Sanctions Alert Review and Adverse Media Monitoring AI Digital Worker that can reduce false positive alerts by more than 80 percent, visit workfusion.com.