What is adverse media screening?
Lists lag reality. Adverse media screening is the search of news, court reporting and other public sources for negative information about a counterparty, from fraud and corruption to sanctions evasion, organised crime and environmental offences.
A person can be reported in a national newspaper for two years before any authority designates them, and many risks never produce a designation at all. Adverse media covers that gap and is expected under the FATF standards as part of ongoing due diligence and risk assessment. Two problems are chronic. Most reporting about a Polish, Turkish or Vietnamese counterparty is not in English, and a finding without a source link and a date is worth nothing to an auditor.
What this workflow covers
SCOPE- Search name and identifiers across news and public records, then keep each finding with its URL, publication and date.
- A supplier with no list hit, named in two regional outlets over a procurement fraud investigation, is a reason for enhanced due diligence rather than a freeze.
- Common names return articles about other people, so a finding is only usable when the identifiers in the article match your subject.
- Our adverse-media review runs in the counterparty's local languages, and where nothing turns up the result reads no cited source found rather than an all-clear.
- An allegation reported in the press is not a finding of guilt.
Compliance glossary
TERMS- Negative news
- Another name for adverse media: public reporting connecting a subject to financial crime, corruption or other risk themes.
- OSINT
- Open-source intelligence: research using publicly available sources such as media, registries, court records and official publications.
Authoritative references
SOURCES- 01The FATF Recommendations
Financial Action Task Force
- 02Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 — customer due diligence requirements
EUR-Lex, Official Journal of the European Union
Frequently asked questions
Q&A- Is adverse media screening actually required?
- It is rarely a standalone legal obligation, and it is how firms meet the broader duty to understand a customer's risk profile and to run enhanced due diligence on higher-risk relationships. Supervisors expect to see it in high-risk files, so its absence there is the thing that gets questioned.
- How far back should we search?
- There is no fixed window. Most teams look back several years for serious financial crime themes and treat older items as context rather than current risk, recording the reasoning either way so the choice is visible.
- Do we have to search in the local language?
- If you want the finding, yes. English-only searching systematically misses local reporting, which is where nearly all the detail about smaller counterparties lives.
- What do we keep on file?
- The search terms, the sources searched, the date, every finding with its URL and publication date, and the analyst's assessment. A screenshot with no URL and no date is weak evidence and will be treated as such.