In the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic, risk management and compliance teams need to remain alert and primed to spot high-risk customers that could pose threats to company finances, investors, and reputation. The good news is that onboarding new customers and assessing potential risk to your company doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. By taking a few simple steps to enhance your due diligence, you can protect your company’s reputation, reduce operational risk, and ensure AML and KYC regulations compliance. If your company is interested in exploring how adverse media search can help you stay in compliance with evolving regulations, then consider adding EVS’ Adverse Media Search as a key step in your existing due diligence process.
What is Adverse Media Search?
Adverse media includes any negative news or unfavorable information about individuals or organizations. This information can be discovered across traditional and unstructured news sources. Adverse media searches are a customer risk assessment tool used to discover any negative news associated with high-risk customers. This negative news can range from fraudulent financial activity to workplace discrimination.
Since modern news is now disseminated via a variety of online news, social, and video platforms, modern risk mitigation requires an expanded view of adverse media sources. An exhaustive adverse media screening not only combs traditional news sources like television and newspapers, but it expands its search to find negative news from blogs, databases, social media platforms, and user-generated forums such as Reddit. Proactively expanding the scope of your adverse media search to include all news sources is the most efficient and reliable way to generate complete risk assessments of new and existing customers. And because adverse media searches can be used as ongoing assessment tools, these screenings can be implemented more frequently with higher-risk customers.
How Will EVS’ Adverse Media Search Protect My Company?
Relying upon free online searches or manual screenings is an unsustainable and inaccurate method of gathering critical information about your customers. Constantly monitoring every news source, collecting and categorizing the vast amounts of customer data, and determining the relevancy and validity of the information can quickly become an unnecessary drain on time and resources, even for the most seasoned compliance team. By utilizing a structured, well-executed screening system like EVS’ Adverse Media Search, your company can quickly and easily detect customers’ appearance on any sanctions or watch lists, as well as find past or current activity that indicates involvement in illegal activities.
EVS’ Adverse Media Search adds an extra layer of security to your customer screening process by scanning thousands of credible, global third-party data sources to verify customers and uncover any unfavorable information. In one simple search, EVS’ Adverse Media Search scans more than 15,000 credible media sources for negative news about customers’ potential connections to financial crime, including money laundering, terrorist financing, cybercrimes, or even human trafficking.
This simple scan can not only mitigate risk by highlighting customers that may be involved in fraudulent activity, but it can also help protect your company’s reputation, enhance your due diligence process, and maintain your company’s compliance with evolving global KYC and CDD regulations. To learn more about the key features of EVS’ Adverse Media Search and how you can integrate this scan as part of your current due diligence procedures, connect with the EVS team today.
