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Sanctions, adverse media and KYC screening, explained

Practical explainers for compliance teams: what the rules say, where screening goes wrong, and how AdverseMe handles it.

Screening is a small field carrying a lot of folklore. These posts set out what the rules actually say, what the published source files actually contain, and what a screening tool can and cannot prove. They are written for the people who sign the file: MLROs, compliance officers, and the analysts who have to defend a decision months after they made it.

Everything here is grounded in how AdverseMe works. Subjects are screened against 110+ named sources, among them 13 official sanctions feeds and the 5 GCC and MENA national terror lists parsed from the publishers' own files, and every finding is scored by 4 independent AI judges. Where a post describes a method, the product page that documents it is one link away.

Where to start

  • Every source, named

    The full catalogue of 110+ sources by category, country and tier, with the status of each one. If a list is not on that page, we do not claim to check it.

  • How a finding gets its score

    4 models from 4 families rate each finding blind at temperature zero. The median becomes the score and dissent is recorded rather than smoothed away.

  • What the audit trail holds

    Every source queried, what each one returned, and what was dropped as a wrong-entity match, kept with the screening so the working can be shown later.

  • Ownership and the 50 percent rule

    Officers, parents and beneficial owners traced to depth 6, with aggregate and indirect ownership computed across the whole chain.

  • UAE obligations in practice

    What a regulated firm or a DNFBP in the UAE has to screen against, when a freeze applies, and what the file needs to contain afterwards.

Latest posts

  1. Adverse-media false positives: why they happen and how to cut them

    Common names, transliteration, syndicated stories and stale allegations produce most adverse-media false positives. Here is where they come from, why simple filters make them worse, and how AdverseMe handles each cause.

    • adverse-media
    • false-positives
    • kyc

  2. Why AdverseMe scores every finding with four judges at temperature zero

    How four independent models assess findings, how the median and dissent are used, and how evidence-signature caching supports repeatable verdicts with explicit limitations.

    • ai-council
    • explainability
    • product

  3. Screening five GCC and MENA national designation lists

    How AdverseMe integrates national designation lists from the UAE, Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, with separate parsers, source evidence and daily refresh schedules.

    • sanctions
    • mena
    • gcc
    • coverage

  4. UAE targeted financial sanctions: what Cabinet Decision 74 of 2020 asks of you

    A plain-language walk through the UAE's targeted financial sanctions regime for financial institutions and DNFBPs: which lists to screen, when to freeze, what to report to the EOCN and how to keep the evidence.

    • uae
    • sanctions
    • tfs
    • dnfbp

  5. The OFAC 50 percent rule, explained for screening teams

    What OFAC's 50 Percent Rule actually says, how aggregate and indirect ownership are counted, where teams get it wrong, and how to compute it across an ownership chain.

    • sanctions
    • ofac
    • ownership

Screen the next name with the evidence attached.

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