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Adverse Media Search

High-risk individuals and entities often have an intricate web of contacts, associates and networks that work to mask illicit financial activities. Identifying contacts, relatives and close associates involves a particularly complex investigation of interconnections that cannot easily be pieced together without extensive, global, historical and current media investigation.

A High-Risk Approach to High-Risk Clients

While sanctions and watch lists catalog individuals and entities that you cannot do business with, high-risk customers, such as politically exposed persons (PEPs) or those who are suspected of illicit or unethical behavior, are harder to identify. PEP databases are a useful investigative tool to manage some due diligence around high-risk customers but do not represent a total solution. PEP databases are by their very nature selective, and expose a proportion of, but not all, identities that have been the subject of adverse media. It is adverse media searching itself which presents the total risk picture.

Some firms have relied on open-source search engines such as Google to search for adverse media on their high-risk clients. These do not capture all published adverse content and generally return many thousands of false positive results. They leave an open search footprint, but no audit trail to demonstrate to the regulators. In short, they represent a high-risk approach to investigating high-risk clients.

Global Screening Adverse Media Search - Your Early Warning System

Global Screening Adverse Media Search is a powerful investigative tool to assess risk associated with your clients. It provides early warning detection of reasons why you may not want to do business with potential clients or, just as importantly, reasons to reassess the risk of existing business relationships.

Drawing on Thomson Dialog, one of the world's most comprehensive collections of global news and current awareness, Adverse Media Search delivers a purpose-built and powerful artificial intelligence engine that optimizes and categorizes content to deliver relevant and specific search results.

Adverse media searching can be applied with each high-risk client acquisition, but also performs an important role in ongoing checks against your client lists - actively alerting you to any coverage which may warrant a change in risk status or a reassessment of the business relationship.

Benefits

  • Early warning system automatically flags increased client risk - helps reduce yours.
  • Search the entire PEP universe - not just selective databases.
  • Powerful research tool with greater breadth and depth and veracity than any internet search engine.
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