Compliance teams often treat sanctions screening, PEP screening and adverse media screening as interchangeable checkboxes on an onboarding form. They are not.
Each layer addresses a distinct category of risk, draws on a different data source, and catches what the other two miss, said Opoint.
Opoint recently discussed what the difference between Adverse media, sanctions and PEP screening.
Firms that understand the difference build a screening workflow that is both effective and defensible; those that don’t leave gaps regulators will eventually find.
Sanctions screening is the most binary of the three. It checks a subject against official lists maintained by bodies such as the UN, EU, OFAC and OFSI. A match means the subject is a designated party and the relationship cannot proceed without authorisation. What sanctions screening cannot do is catch risk that hasn’t yet resulted in a formal designation, including live investigations or entities linked to sanctioned networks but not themselves listed.
PEP screening works differently. It flags individuals whose public roles carry an elevated risk of corruption or money laundering exposure. A PEP match doesn’t block a relationship outright; it triggers Enhanced Due Diligence, a deeper look at source of funds and the nature of the business.
But a clean PEP record says nothing about what that person is currently doing, or whether adverse coverage has since emerged.
That’s where adverse media screening comes in. Rather than checking against a fixed list, it monitors live and historical news for allegations, regulatory action and reputational red flags that lists simply don’t capture. It doesn’t deliver a binary compliance verdict the way a sanctions hit does; it requires human judgement to weigh credibility and relevance. Crucially, it’s the only one of the three that offers continuous visibility, running before, during and after a relationship is established, while sanctions and PEP status are checked at fixed points and updated periodically.
A mature workflow runs all three simultaneously at onboarding, then keeps monitoring throughout the customer lifecycle, since designations, PEP status and media coverage can all shift long after the initial check.
Sourcing that adverse media feed is a different challenge to buying a sanctions list or PEP database. It demands a news infrastructure that spans the languages and jurisdictions where counterparties actually operate, delivered fast enough to act on. Opoint, for instance, covers more than 250,000 sources across 135 languages and 230 jurisdictions, with entity tagging that links coverage directly to individuals and organisations in a compliance database, delivering stories in under seven minutes from publication.
Over 60% of its coverage is non-English, reflecting that financial crime and regulatory stories often break in local markets first.
Read the full Opoint post here.
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