What is Adverse Media
Adverse media — sometimes also called “negative news” — refers to publicly-available information about an individual or organisation that may indicate involvement in wrongdoing, unethical behaviour or other risk-relevant activities. For example, this might include news reports, blogs, court filings or regulatory notices documenting allegations or convictions of fraud, money-laundering, corruption, sanctions evasion, human trafficking and other such matters.
Adverse media is important because it offers early signals of risk before official sanctions or regulatory action may appear, and can therefore form a key part of due diligence, compliance or risk-monitoring processes.
When we say we provide adverse-media coverage, we mean that our platform supplies you with both current (last 30 days) and historic (back untill 2014) news articles and events that may reflect such negative or risk-relevant findings.
What do we mean by an “Event”
In the context of our offering, an event is a distinct occurrence or development in the news or world-affairs that is captured, grouped and structured so you can track its relevance over time. For example:
A corporate scandal being exposed in multiple articles might be treated as one event.
A political upheaval in a country, a natural disaster, a major regulatory enforcement action — each of those is an event.
Using events allows you not only to read articles, but to monitor how a given topic develops, how it is referenced across different sources, when it occurs, and what entity (person/company/country) it relates to.
Why This Matters
By monitoring adverse media through news articles and events, you gain early-warning capability: you may become aware of risk-signalling behaviour before it becomes a formal case.
Having both current (real-time or near real-time) and historic (past years’ data) coverage enables you to conduct retrospective analysis, identify patterns or changes in behaviour, and maintain better ongoing monitoring.
The event-based approach means you don’t have to treat each article in isolation: you can assess the broader context of an incident, how it evolves, and what entities are involved.