Automating Adverse Media Screening Amid Rising Compliance Stakes

Dermot Corrigan, CEO of smartKYC, notes that banks are moving away from manual oversight due to the sheer volume of data and the high risk of human error. The challenge lies in minimizing noise—false positives, irrelevant mentions, and repetitive reports—that often plague traditional screening methods. By deploying solutions like smartEYE, institutions can shift to continuous, background monitoring, alerting analysts only when specific, high-risk thresholds are breached. This transition is becoming essential to avoid the "abandonment" problem, where excessively long onboarding times frustrate clients in strictly regulated jurisdictions like Singapore.

Beyond technical efficiency, the stakes involve safeguarding a firm’s standing against guilt by association. A recent survey by Ripjar, which polled 400 senior decision-makers across the UK, US, France, and Germany, confirms this urgency: 93% of leaders now classify adverse media screening as a critical pillar of their risk frameworks. With 90% of those surveyed planning to increase investment in the coming year, the focus is squarely on tools that provide both speed and a robust audit trail. As Corrigan emphasizes, banks require systems that automate triage while keeping human teams in control, ensuring every system event and user action is recorded for regulatory scrutiny.