Adverse media screening, defined, and not something Solidus does

Solidus ships no adverse-media screening. It is not-built in our lexicon, alongside sanctions and PEP screening. This page defines the term because buyers use it: it is not a capability description.

What it is

Searching news, court records and other public sources for negative information about a customer: allegations, investigations, convictions, regulatory actions, or association with any of those.

It sits beside sanctions screening but answers a different question. Sanctions screening asks is this party on a list?, a bounded question against a defined source. Adverse media asks is there anything concerning published about this party?, an unbounded question against an open corpus.

That unboundedness is what makes it hard, and it produces three problems no vendor fully solves:

• Relevance. Most matches on a common name are the wrong person, and false-positive rate is the metric that governs whether the process is workable at all.
• Materiality. An allegation is not a conviction; a decade-old article may or may not matter. Someone has to decide, and record why.
• Recency and language. Coverage is uneven across jurisdictions and languages, so absence of adverse media is weak evidence of absence of adverse conduct.

Why Solidus contributes nothing here

A verifiable credential attests that an identity was verified. It carries no information about what has been published about that person, and no amount of cryptographic assurance changes that.

There is no honest angle to write, so this page does not manufacture one. Adverse-media screening is a data business, corpus coverage, entity resolution, language handling and match tuning. We have none of those things and are not building them.

Evaluate screening vendors for this. That is the correct action after reading this page.

The adjacent, modest truth

Screening of any kind works better against a reliably established identity, resolving a match against a well-verified subject is a stronger conclusion than resolving it against a self-asserted name. That is a genuine but narrow contribution, and it is the same one stated on sanctions screening: we can help you be sure who you are screening. We cannot screen them.