Negative media (adverse media) screening is a process for identifying any adverse or potentially damaging information about individuals or entities in the news and other publicly available sources. It involves the systematic search and analysis of a wide range of media sources, including online news portals, magazines, regulators' press releases, court filings, and other publicly available sources, to uncover negative reports or mentions that could indicate a risk associated with a particular individual or organisation. This might include involvement in financial crimes, such as money laundering, fraud, or terrorism financing, as well as other illegal or unethical activities.
bronID employs a sophisticated approach to performing negative media screening, ensuring that our clients have access to comprehensive, relevant, and accurate information about their customers.
bronID has developed an extensive list of thousands of reputable data sources. This collection includes:
- Press releases from regulators
- News articles
- Press releases from international bodies
- Court filings
- Transcripts of court proceedings
- Investigative journalist articles
- Other publicly available sources
Our list also encompasses articles that may sit behind a paywall, ensuring that no critical information is overlooked due to access restrictions. This list is meticulously curated to exclude speculative data sources or opinions that are biased, focusing solely on credible and reliable information.
When you perform a negative media check with bronID, we conduct a thorough search of the customer's name, in relationship with relevant triggers such as "money laundering," "terrorism financing," and predicate offences, along with any other adverse findings. This ensures that the screening process is both comprehensive and targeted, capturing a broad spectrum of potential risks.
Upon identifying a match, bronID undertakes an analysis of the retrieved text, assessing its sentiment to gauge the severity and relevance of the information. Our system then automatically compiles a summary of what has been detected, providing a clear and concise overview of whether there are any negative media findings and, if so, what these findings are.
Alongside the summary report, bronID provides a list of articles and sources where the negative information was found. This allows you to refer to and inspect these sources further, offering the opportunity for a deeper dive into the context and details of the adverse findings.
Negative media and false positives
Negative media screening is susceptible to false positives, much more so than false negatives. Although bronID reads and understands the context of the text and analyses whether the screened organisation is the one that is actually involved in the negative act, rather than being adjacent to it in a different way, depending on the content of the negative media, screening may return a summarised result that an entity is involved in a negative connotation. For instance, an entity mentioned in a case involving money laundering or fraud might be flagged for negative media coverage despite not being the subject of the allegations themselves but merely associated with the case.
In such cases, bronID will provide a detailed list of articles where you can check for more information and manually perform a more detailed analysis to investigate further.
