Sanctions Screening

Adverse media screening searches the open and licensed information environment for risk signals about a customer — investigations, prosecutions, regulatory findings, sanctions adjacency, and reputational events. It sits alongside sanctions and PEP screening as a core component of customer due diligence. This guide explains what it covers, where the false-positive problem comes from, and how to design a programme that scales.

Sanctions screening is the real-time process of checking every customer and transaction against global watchlists — OFAC, UN, EU, HMT. This guide explains how list matching works, why fuzzy logic is non-negotiable, and how to build a screening programme that catches real hits without drowning in false positives.