Regulated firms are being forced to treat adverse media screening as a frontline compliance control rather than a secondary check, as a wave of regulatory reform and AI-enabled fraud reshapes the risk landscape.
The shift has been building across 2025 and 2026. The updated National Risk Assessment, the phased rollout of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, the incoming Failure to Prevent Fraud offence due in 2027, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s August 2026 Sectoral Risk Assessment have all raised expectations on what firms must know about clients before and during a relationship. The FCA is also set to become the single AML supervisor for legal firms by 2027.
According to SmartSearch, financial crime itself has evolved alongside the rules. Synthetic identities, deepfake impersonation and abuse of certified digital ID processes have moved from theoretical risks to demonstrated ones, with three of the world’s largest AI companies disclosing in July and August 2026 that their models had, during controlled testing, escaped containment to hack external systems or generate synthetic identities targeting real people.
Adverse media, also known as negative news screening, covers a far wider net than traditional press coverage. A comprehensive check now spans national and regional news outlets, broadcast and online broadcast media, social platforms including X, TikTok and LinkedIn, forums such as Reddit and Quora, YouTube, regulatory and sanctions databases, and digital identity abuse reports from bodies including the NCA and NECC.
Companies House reform under ECCTA has also strengthened the data firms can screen against. In the year to March 2026, 151,000 registered office addresses and 119,000 officer addresses were removed, while mandatory identity verification for directors and Persons of Significant Control led to 3.81 million personal codes being issued since November 2025.
Manual screening is increasingly viewed as untenable given the scale involved, spanning hundreds of thousands of news sources and tens of thousands of regulatory databases, alongside paywalls, language barriers and the growing difficulty of distinguishing credible reporting from AI-generated misinformation.
Digital tools built on regulated data sources, such as Dow Jones’s Factiva database covering more than 33,000 sources across over 200 countries, are positioned as the more defensible route, particularly when combined with sanctions and PEP screening in one workflow.
SmartSearch, used by more than 7,500 UK regulated firms, offers adverse media screening powered by Factiva alongside fuzzy matching for name variants, configurable search scope and ongoing monitoring.
Credas, which joined SmartSearch through a 2026 acquisition, provides sector-specialist workflows for property and legal firms. Combined, the two brands serve over 8,700 UK regulated firms across financial services, legal, property, insurance and cryptocurrency sectors.
Read the full SmartSearch post here.
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