Checking customers and counterparties against news and media sources to identify claims of fraud, corruption, financial crime and other risk is an inevitable and important task for the private banking and wealth sector. A new survey delves into the details, including the impact of how AI and other tech affect the issues.

The old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity doesn’t go down well with private banks and wealth managers. Tracking media reports about people and institutions is essential in firms’ AML and KYC processes, where penalties for failings can run to billions of dollars. 

Evidence from a new survey – The State of Adverse Media Screening – suggests that adverse media coverage is a factor that financial firms pay significant attention to. 

According to a 27-page report released in early June from Ripjar, 93 per cent of financial services leaders rate adverse media screening as critical or very important in their risk frameworks; 90 per cent intend to raise spending on this area in the next 12 months. Ripjar is an AI-native provider of smarter screening solutions. It polled 400 senior financial services decision-makers across the UK, the US, France and Germany.

Adverse media screening is defined as the process of checking customers and counterparties against global news and media sources to identify allegations of financial crime, fraud, corruption or other risk. 

Ripjar – which has commented on issues such as privacy for WealthBriefing – said its research showed that 77 per cent of respondents already conduct adverse media screening. Separately, 82 per cent carry out politically exposed person (PEP) screening and 79 per cent screen for sanctions. 

“Adverse media screening has rapidly become one of the highest-stakes disciplines in financial crime compliance. 93 per cent of financial services leaders now rate it as critical or very important to their risk frameworks, and 90 per cent plan to increase investment over the next 12 months,” Matt Mills (pictured below), Ripjar CEO, said in the report. 

Matt Mills

“The cost of standing still is not theoretical. Financial institutions have paid more than $69 billion in AML enforcement actions globally since the 2007 financial crisis. In 2024 alone, penalties against banks worldwide jumped 522 per cent year-on-year to $3.65 billion.

“The pattern across the largest recent cases is the same: adverse signals existed, in the open, for years before enforcement landed. What was missing was not the data but the ability to surface it continuously and act on it in time,” he said.

Information service providers provide data, some provided from media sources, of use to bankers and wealth advisors screening for potential money laundering and related risks. For example, this news service has spoken to Dow Jones and Moody’s Analytics. Other firms operating in this area include smartKYC, S&P Global Market Intelligence, Experian and FactSet.

There can be frictions: Demands for accessible data which can be fed into these systems clashes with privacy concerns, including the extent to which beneficial ownership should sit on public registers. (See articles here and here.)

Without ability to rapidly screen potential clients, wealth managers can be forced into setting long onboarding times – creating a potential “abandonment” problem. This news service hears that in jurisdictions such as Singapore, which have tightened compliance regulations, long onboarding times are a headache. 

High speed
The report found that the most dangerous adverse media failures are caused not by a lack of data but by periodic review models in a world that moves continuously, at high speed. 

Some 58 per cent of those questioned said they still rely on manual internet searches. The report also found that more than a quarter don’t screen continuously. 

“We call this the intent-capability gap: the distance between what compliance leaders know adverse media screening should be, and what their current tooling delivers. In an enforcement environment where individual penalties run into the billions, it is both reputationally and commercially vital that financial institutions close this gap,” Mills said. 

In March, Mills commented in these pages about topics such as the “right to be forgotten” and efforts by policymakers, whether well-meaning or not, to allow certain information to be scrubbed off the internet and other sources. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice in the UK ordered of the Courtsdesk archive to be deleted, removing millions of historical cases from public access but subsequently withdrew its demand following an intense backlash. Courtsdesk, which contains an extensive database of UK court records, has become a critical resource for journalists needing to search, verify and report on criminal cases. However, after pushback from journalists and lawmakers who cited open justice concerns, the government halted this move to explore other options.