What is Adverse Media Monitoring? And Why is it Critical?
When organizations look for adverse media about a person or company to detect risks, we call this adverse media monitoring. This blog answers some of the most asked questions about adverse media monitoring.
Why do organizations monitor for adverse media?
Companies frequently search for negative information about the people and organizations they work with, such as clients, merchants, and vendors. Typical areas where risk managers often look to identify potential risks are cyber security, environmental, social, and governance (ESG), financial, AML-CTF, and regulatory compliance.
What are adverse media examples?
What is considered a critical risk for a company depends on its business model and its exposure areas. Customers unhappy with a company’s service, reports of fraud involving a company’s leadership, stories of security breaches (like data leaks), and articles alleging a company is not paying its suppliers are all examples of adverse media.
Are companies obligated to monitor for adverse media?
Regulatory bodies require financial organizations to have sufficiently robust KYC processes in place to protect the company and its clients; adverse media monitoring is a powerful method of monitoring the risk profile of a company’s interests. Therefore, adverse media is often part of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundry (AML) programs. Also, regulators often require financial organizations to prove they conducted sound adverse media checks before onboarding clients (e.g., provide an audit trail).
What is the difference between adverse media monitoring and adverse media screening?
When adverse media checks are conducted before a person or entity is onboarded, we call this adverse media screening. When companies conduct media checks after a vendor is onboarded and on a continuous basis thereafter, we call this adverse media monitoring or perpetual monitoring.
What’s the difference between adverse media monitoring and negative news monitoring?
Adverse and negative news monitoring are terms used interchangeably to monitor and analyze media sources for potentially adverse or negative information about individuals, companies, or entities. Both approaches involve actively searching for news, articles, reports, and other data that may indicate risks or potential issues related to cyber security, financial stability, regulatory compliance, social responsibility, and more. Ultimately, whether referred to as adverse media or negative news monitoring, the objective remains: to stay ahead of potential risks and make informed business decisions based on comprehensive and up-to-date information.
What are the most common challenges when monitoring for adverse media?
For many organizations, conducting reliable adverse media checks is challenging. When, for example, Google is used for adverse media checks, the chances are that a lot of relevant signals will be missed. Alerting tools like Google Alerts tend to generate too many alerts, thus creating noise. Organizations also often struggle with the challenges of monitoring adverse media in different languages and determining if detected media signals are from trustworthy sources.
How can Owlin help you with monitoring adverse media?
Owlin is an adverse media screening tool that uses AI (NLP) and LLMs (Large Language Models) to help you to sort through significant amounts of information and quickly make sense of it. This allows you and your organization to focus on the most critical events and avoid wasting time on things that won’t impact your organization. We would love to tell you more about our platform’s core capabilities:
Mining of news and data from over 3 million sources
Owlin’s algorithms access vast amounts of information from a wide range of curated sources, including media sites, corporate sites, government publications, and regulatory authorities. This gives you a comprehensive view of the news and data you need.
17 different languages
Our platform can translate information from 17 languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Russian. This way, you can be sure we are catching all the important events that are relevant to you.
Help you focus on what’s relevant to you
The Owlin platform analyzes information using AI (NLP) and LLMs (Large Language Models). After determining the risks most important to you, we set up filters that sort, rank, and make sense of different data sources and help you extract risk signals from the data.
What can we do for you?
We would love to help you stay up-to-date on what’s happening with your portfolio in real-time. Feel free to contact us or schedule a demo to learn more about what we can do for you. We look forward to getting to know you!