Everybody HATES negative news screening

Soul-sucking work?

Despite cultural, geographic and language differences, some everyday minor grievances are universal. Some of them are work-related; some aren’t.

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Who among us doesn’t hate being tormented by a fly in the middle of the night when we’re desperate for sleep? Or, being stuck behind the tallest parent at your kid’s graduation ceremony or school play? Or dealing with close talkers who are right up in your face during a conversation? How about the people at the office talking so loudly, no one else can focus or concentrate? You get the point. Universal grievances.

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Well, there’s another universal grievance to add to this list: negative news screening. Don’t believe me? In my role as head of partnerships, I’ve spoken to hundreds of people from India to South Africa to Lithuania to the UK and beyond. Everybody HATES negative news screening.

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As one Valital client said during our first initial discovery conversation, “Negative news screening is soul sucking work.” I had to scribble it down for posterity!

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Adverse media is the bane of the screening world

Pity those analysts and researchers spending hours searching online for individuals and organizations they need to vet as part of their AML/KYC, background checks, or operational due diligence process. It is time-consuming, labour-intensive, unfulfilling yet necessary work. If there’s a team of people doing it, there’s a strong likelihood they’re doing it differently, inconsistently. People become distracted. They fall down the internet rabbit hole. They don’t know if they’ve found the right John Smith among the hundreds of thousands of John Smiths in a specific geographic area. The list of challenges is long.

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Many legacy data management companies that offer negative news screening don’t provide much relief. Sure, they might deliver search results faster, but analysts still need to sift through the maze of false positives to find the right person, because many of them still use simple name matching and keyword search to find information online. What’s more, they’re essentially searchable databases, with access to licensed media sources that tend to only cover big news or known people and companies. The nugget you’re looking for might be in a local, regional or trade publication. Here, again, the list of challenges is long.

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Regulators are asking for adverse media screening

This is why EVERYBODY HATES negative news screening. It is the bane of the screening world. And, it’s why Valital is committed to solving this issue. Adverse media or negative news screening is our core competency. We’re drowning in a sea of unstructured data; that is, data that comes at us in a variety of contexts, and an even bigger variety of formats. We’re talking about information typically found in the public domain, such as articles, blogs, government records, online forums, social media posts, video and audio files, and so on. 

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Unstructured data is difficult to collect, process and analyze, but in today’s world, regulators increasingly expect AML and compliance teams to integrate adverse media within their AML/KYC processes. 

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Users submit minimal information and Valital’s AI models scour the internet in real-time, using Natural Language Processing, a form of AI that understands human language, to understand content and context. The algorithms correlate the information found online to what the user submits.

Valital isn’t tethered to licensing deals with media companies, unlike the vast majority of traditional data companies. Small, large, regional, local – our AI models go wherever publicly available adverse media reside online. 

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Minimizing the hate

The numbers speak for themselves. Valital delivers three times more relevant links than a human analyst would normally find on their own. Most importantly, the solution filters almost 90% of online data it extracts. Why? Because most of it is irrelevant noise. When all is said and done an AML/KYC analyst manually checking 1,000 name entities per year will save up to 200 hours. Precious time that can be used for more value-added strategic work.

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I guess you could say that Valital is doing its part to ease the pain of negative news screening. No one is ever going to love it, but we’re on a mission to help you HATE it less.

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