Adverse media screening

Published coverage linking a person or company to financial crime, regulatory action, corruption, fraud or serious misconduct.

Routine business news is not returned as adverse. A director appearing in an article about a funding round or an industry conference is not a finding, and treating it as one would bury the actual signal under noise.

The distinction is applied at grading, not left to the reviewer, which is what keeps the result set small enough to be read properly.

Because coverage usually precedes consequences. It is the earliest public signal that a relationship carries risk.

A sanctions list records a decision that has already been made. A court record reflects a matter that has already been filed. Media coverage of an investigation, a regulatory inquiry or a pattern of allegations frequently appears months or years before either, and often before any formal finding exists at all.

For enhanced due diligence, that gap is the whole point. Adverse media search is a standard component of EDD on high-risk customers and PEPs precisely because the lists alone tell you what has already been concluded, not what is currently underway.

Three other sources, so a subject check returns a rounded picture instead of press coverage in isolation:

• Court records — Australian civil and criminal listings, more than 40 million of them
• Regulatory actions — ASIC, AUSTRAC and APRA
• Corporate history — ASIC directorships

Media coverage draws on hundreds of sources across more than 268 countries. Running the four together is what allows an allegation in an article to be checked against whether anything formal ever followed it.

Each article carries a relevance grade based on how strongly the coverage identifies the subject and how serious the allegation is, and weak name-only matches are separated from confirmed-identity findings.

Results also arrive with an AI-generated summary covering who the person is, what they have been involved in, and the nature of any offences or controversies, drawn from the source articles found. Alongside it you get a categorisation of the adverse media type (financial crime, drug trafficking, fraud and so on), direct links to the original reports, and the location the activity is associated with.

The summary exists so an analyst can make an initial assessment without reading every article, which for a common name across hundreds of sources is the difference between a usable check and an unusable one. It is a triage aid, not the finding: the source links are there because a decision that matters should rest on the underlying article, not a summary of it.

Yes, and company checks reach further than the entity name alone.

A company check also pulls ASIC records and directorship history, so adverse coverage of an officer surfaces against the entity they are connected to. That link is usually where the risk sits: the company itself may have no coverage at all while one of its directors has a documented history under their own name.

It works in the other direction too: an officer search across appointments shows whether a subject has been connected to entities that do carry coverage.

Either, and the right answer depends on whether the decision is a moment or a relationship.

A point-in-time check suits a decision being made now: an investment committee paper, a counterparty assessment, an onboarding sign-off.

Ongoing monitoring puts the subject under an adverse media monitor in WatchEye, which re-screens them on a schedule you set. Weekly is the common choice for media, against monthly or quarterly for slower sources. Each run raises an event for anything new and emails your team.

For customers and suppliers you will hold for years, the point-in-time check answers a question with an expiry date on it. Most adverse coverage that matters appears after onboarding, not before, so the interval you choose is effectively how long a story can run before you know about it.

Yes, and this is a large part of what the grading and sourcing are for.

Results export with source, date and relevance grading, which is exactly what an investment committee pack or an enhanced due diligence sign-off needs to reference. A finding that cannot be attributed to a dated source is not usable in a decision record, however suggestive it is.

Keeping the export structured also means a decision can be revisited later on the basis of what was known at the time, not what is known now.

Archives span decades for the major sources.

Every result is dated, which matters as much as the depth does. A twenty-year-old allegation that was never substantiated and a current, active investigation are very different inputs to a decision, and undated results collapse that distinction entirely.

Dating also lets you apply your own policy consistently. Many organisations weight coverage differently by age, and that is only possible if the age of each finding is on the record.