Why adverse media screening during the Coronavirus pandemic is more important than ever

Society faces unprecedented challenges due to the global COVID-19 crisis. Yet despite this extraordinary disruption, risk management operations must stay on high alert because failing to spot potential risk can lead to substantial fines, loss of investor and consumer confidence, and brand devaluation. Adverse media monitoring offers entities valuable insights that can reveal a variety of potential regulatory, reputational, financial, and strategic risks—including elevated risk of financial crime and corruption.

What is Adverse Media?

Adverse media or negative news entails much more than traditional news, such as TV, radio or print. Extracted from a variety of sources, including social commentary, web posts, blogs, and other online sources, it identifies negative or adverse information about entities.

Monitoring adverse media can help companies recognize potential entity risk issues—such as financial fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, organized crime or bribery—that not only undermines a company’s ability to mitigate and prevent regulatory repercussions, but can also critically weaken its public reputation. Increasingly, regulatory agencies expect corporate entities to carry out comprehensive Customer Due Diligence (CDD) checks as part their risk management process. Leveraging adverse media can support companies in this.

Finding the needle in the data-haystack

Every day more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of content and data are created. This immense volume of data, as well as its complexity make it challenging to identify specifically searched-for data. The key to keeping track of the explosion in media data is customization and a tailor-made experience. Here, data sets and tools that leverage adaptable templates are gaining the private sector’s attention. While conventional adverse media monitoring solutions either apply default adverse media filters or require time-consuming manual processing, adverse media monitoring with customizable filters allow organizations to add or delete keywords based on their unique risk considerations. To help ensure the broadest understanding of potential risk, adverse media monitoring solutions should span global, national, and local sources in multiple languages.

Data-driven risk management

Whether an organization wants to leverage adverse media screening to check third-parties for signs of financial crime or corruption, look for potential  ethical issues, or to monitor its own reputation, adverse media monitoring can help signal where further due diligence is needed. With customizable adverse media screening, organizations worldwide can tailor their adverse media screening, organizations worldwide can tailor their adverse media monitoring to help make data-driven decisions.