In the anti-money laundering (AML) and financial crime compliance universe, adverse media monitoring (a.k.a. negative news screening) is a critical — but notoriously labor-intensive — function. Analysts must scour news sources, legal publications, internal systems, and open-source content to detect risks tied to people and entities, then assess whether those risks require escalation for deeper investigation. This is why, since 2022, banks and other financial institutions have been using WorkFusion’s AI Agent solution—named Evan—to automate, improve, and scale their adverse media monitoring workflows.
Why is AI Agent Evan a top choice for AML/CFT customers? We’ve complied the top 10 reasons why financial crime compliance organizations deploy “him” to reduce risk, cut costs, and improve efficiency.
What Can Evan Do?
Evan is a pre-built AI Agent that integrates with news sources and existing case management tools to reduce the negative news alert noise. He automates the work associated with sifting through potential negative news articles – reducing a 20-minute process to 2 minutes. This is extremely useful to compliance teams, because traditional adverse media screening approaches often involve Google searches, or even better, news sources like Thomson Reuters Clear that surface massive volumes of articles, the majority of which are false positives, forcing humans to sift through the noise.
Delivered as a pre-built AI Agent focused on automating adverse media monitoring, Evan rapidly reviews troves of potential negative news articles and clears away the noise from false positive alerts, while prioritizing potential areas of risk—the few needles in the haystack which compliance teams can’t afford to miss. Evan can do a lot, so his specific responsibilities are to:
- Review and disposition adverse media alerts by making decisions about the escalation or closure of cases.
- Conduct searches, gather data, and record evidence from internal systems, the internet, and commercial databases. When necessary, make inquiries with business or compliance contacts within the organization.
- Enforce internal strategies, policies, procedures and processes related to monitoring alerts and regulatory requirements.
- Capture and summarize alerts analysis with supporting documentation in adverse media systems.
- Ensure all alerts analysis and investigations are performed within the timeframe provided in policy and stipulated in SLAs.
- Maintain thorough audit trails.
With those capabilities in mind, following are the 10 reasons why AML/CFT compliance teams deploy Evan today. We will cover the first two in detail, as they represent the two most prevalent uses of Evan, then briefly touch on the rest.
Reason #1: Customer/vendor onboarding
One foundational use case for Evan is during the customer onboarding process. As part of KYC diligence, financial institutions must check whether a prospective client has adverse media history.
- Ad hoc negative news searches: Evan can pull in relevant news content automatically based on a candidate’s name (or aliases) during onboarding.
- Contextual assessment: It analyzes sentiment, risk factors (e.g. PEP status, jurisdictions, sanctions exposure), and prior relationships to prioritize relevant alerts.
- False positive filtering: By resolving obvious false positives, Evan spares analysts the majority of manual review steps.
- Narrative reporting & documentation: Evan auto-generates audit-friendly narratives, links to sources, and archiving, reducing compliance teams’ documentation burden and ensuring nothing gets missed.
- Human-in-the-loop handoffs: If Evan is not sufficiently confident about how to disposition an alert or his findings, “he” escalates to a human teammate and provides them with the full context.
Through Evan’s pre-built knowledge, contextual understanding, and workflow automation, onboarding time shrinks dramatically. Evan can reduce an adverse media review that typically takes a person 10–20 minutes down to just 2 minutes. This helps financial institutions balance due diligence and customer experience—onboarding without bottlenecks while managing reputational risk.
Reason #2: KYC refresh and continuous monitoring
KYC profiles must stay up-to-date, which traditionally is done via periodic review. Evan can perform all the same tasks that he does during KYC onboarding (I.e. sourcing news, analyzing articles, prioritization of articles to review, etc.) but now will also have additional content since the last refresh cycle.
Reason #3: Continuous monitoring / perpetual KYC (pKYC)
Adverse media risk is constantly evolving, and KYC programs can do the same. As the refresh interval is often 1 year for high risk, 3 years for medium risk, and 5 years for low risk, there is a risk that adverse media appears within the cycle yet is not reviewed for months or years. To help combat this, Evan can continuously monitor for and analyze new content, a very targeted and effective way to uncover potential risk.
Reason #4: Customer risk profiling
Identifying negative news related to money laundering, corruption, fraud, or terrorist financing helps assess a customer’s risk profile and guide decisions on whether to onboard or exit the relationship.
Reason #5: PEP identification and monitoring
Screening for adverse media is crucial for identifying Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and tracking their activities in domestic and foreign media, which can reveal corruption or other financial crimes.
Reason #6: Sanctions evasion and terrorist financing detection
Monitoring news and reports can reveal connections to sanctioned entities or individuals, as well as individuals who are potentially involved in terrorist financing, even if they do not appear on official lists.
Reason #7: Counterparty analysis
Evan’s ability to surface information regarding all parties to a financial transaction helps to gain a better understanding of who is receiving the money, where the bank lacks full KYC data.
Reason #8: Reputation management
Proactively screening for negative news helps organizations avoid partnerships or customer relationships that could lead to negative publicity and damage their reputation.
Reason #9: Operational integrity
Ensures that an organization’s operations are not inadvertently supporting illegal or unethical activities by revealing negative information about business partners and/or vendors.
Reason #10: Regulatory compliance
Many jurisdictions—from the U.S. and U.K. to Switzerland, Germany, Hong Kong, and Singapore—mandate or recommend the integration of adverse media screening into AML frameworks to meet regulatory obligations.
Evan can typically be deployed in just a matter of weeks. This is due to his out-of-the-box support for Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, Google, and Factiva—plus simple integration with other systems on an ad-hoc basis, including case management and CLM systems like Salesforce and Pega. The result is rapid reduction in manual effort and fast scaling of KYC operations. To learn more about Evan, schedule a demo today. Also, if you’d like more information, you can download our paper “Removing the False Positives Noise from Adverse Media Screening.”
