Adverse media searches and monitoring
Monitoring your customers for adverse media can be a great tool to reduce risk of working with clients who may have been involved in criminal activity.
In this article we explain what is covered by adverse media monitoring and what you want to consider when implementing it within your firm.
What is adverse media monitoring
When you create a monitored search against a contact for adverse media, it is similar to searching the internet and other media sources for mentions of a person who has been involved in criminal activity or has negative connotations.
You may equate it to a Google search which specifically looks at negative information about a particular individual.
As searches within Xama are monitored, a new search is carried out each day to see whether there has been any new media entries that might be of interest.
This provides some reassurance that you will not miss any adverse news that may relate to one of your customers.
What are the different categories of adverse media
When you set up the configuration of your adverse media searches, you can select what type of adverse media you are interested to be alerted about.
The following categories are covered by our third party provider, ComplyAdvantage:
You will see the same categories available within the search configuration page in your Xama account. As you will note, there are a vast number of entities contained within these data sources.
This means that when adverse media is switched on as part of your searches and monitoring, you are likely to receive many more potential matches than when you exclude them from search results.
Especially when creating a search against someone with a common name, the number of search results may seem overwhelming. It is often not possible to accurately eliminate false positives from searches and therefore you need to be aware that including adverse media searches for contacts can create a lot of alerts which are not relevant to your client base.
Reducing the volume of potential matches
At Xama we provide you with the ability to control various filters to either reduce or expand on the number of alerts you are likely to receive.
You can consider the following when setting up your search configuration to narrow down the search and reduce the volume of potential matches:
- Exclude some categories from adverse media monitoring. For example, the Other Minor category contains by far the most entities, but covers areas such as traffic and parking offences which might be less relevant to your requirements.
- Decrease the fuzziness of your searches to reduce matches which are similar but not the same as the person that you are searching for.
- Eliminate deceased individuals from your results.
- Include the year of birth as a search criteria. The year of birth is not always available as part of what is stored within the data sources, but where it is the search will not return such results unless it matches to the year of birth you submitted as part of the search.
- When creating a search on someone with a common name, such as John Smith or Mohammad, consider reducing the use of adverse media searches as you may not have the needed resources to classify all of the returned results effectively.
