Business Adverse Media Report

Overview

The Business Adverse Media Report screens a given business across a global database of 300+ million news articles to identify any negative or unfavorable information associated with a business. 

In general, adverse media, also known as negative news, is defined as any kind of unfavorable information found across a wide variety of news sources – from both ‘traditional’ news outlets and those from unstructured sources. The risks associated with working with businesses having an adverse media profile are many and varied, and it is up to the organization running these screenings to determine how to proceed with the business in question.

The Business Adverse Media Report is typically considered a "pre-cursor" to The Business Watchlist Report, as adverse media is likely to show up far sooner than a flag from sanction and warning lists.

Use Case

Business Adverse Media screening is a critical part of many organizations' customer/vendor due diligence process. Organizations rely on Business Adverse Media screening to know when their clients/vendors have been involved with unethical or criminal activities like money laundering, financial fraud, organized crime, etc. These associations can pose a serious threat to firms’ reputations and can lead to legal repercussions, especially if these firms operate within a regulated sector.

As mentioned in the overview, Business Adverse Media also serves as a leading indicator relative to the Business Watchlist report. Often there's a significant delay between when an entity has been involved in doing something nefarious vs. when it shows up on a Sanctions/Warnings list. The media is much faster at reporting on such activities.

Persona Dashboard view

Interpreting the report

Persona's Business Adverse Media Report uses entity resolution to group together articles for which there is a high degree of confidence that they refer to the same business.

As a result of this, Persona returns all the possible matches (dependent on your organization's search configuration) sorted in order of relevance. This allows you to scroll through all the possible matches to determine whether or not the business you are searching actually is associated with unfavorable information.

In most cases, with the right search configuration setting, organizations can get just a single match back. However, for those organizations that would like to widen their search radius, the Report is highly configurable. Talk to your Persona POC to learn more about your configuration options - whether you want a higher level of fuzziness and therefore surface more matches, or a lower level of fuzziness to ensure more precise results.

Attributes

Relevance

Explains the relevance of the match. The results in the Adverse Media Report are sorted based on relevance. The possible reasons for relevance are:

• Matched the name exactly
• Matched the name with a synonym
• Matched an AKA name with a synonym
• Matched against an AKA name exactly
• Matched for a complex reason, such as acronym
• Matched closely to the name
• Matched the name phonetically

Aliases

Alternate names that the business can also be known as. Our report collects this information from various sources they have regarding this business. These tend to be slight variations in spellings and also the name in different languages based on how the news articles reference this business.

Categories

We categorize the types of unfavorable media associated with a business with the below types. Then, based on the types of unfavorable media associated with a business, we will surface the corresponding types.

• Financial AML/CFT
• Fraud-linked
• General AML/CFT
• Narcotics AML/CFT
• Property Crime
• Terrorism
• Violence AML/CFT
• Cybercrime
• Financial Difficulty
• Other Financial
• Other Minor
• Other Serious
• Regulatory
• Violence NON-AML/CFT

Countries

List of all countries where the adverse media was observed.

Disclaimer

Persona is not a consumer reporting agency and the services (and the data provided as part of its services) do not constitute a ‘consumer report’ for the purposes of the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The data and reports we provide to you may not be used, in whole or in part, to: make any consumer debt collection decision, establish a consumer’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, government benefits, or housing, or for any other purpose authorized under the FCRA. If you use any of any of our services, you agree not to use them, or the data, for any purpose authorized under the FCRA or in relation to taking an adverse action relating to a consumer application.