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Screening in the AML Portal
The AML Portal automatically screens companies and key individuals against global watchlists during onboarding and ongoing monitoring. This article explains how automated screening works, how match scores are calculated, and how to configure your portal's screening behavior.
How Automated Screening Works
When you perform a Company Lookup, the portal automatically retrieves company details and associated Key Roles to run initial screening checks.
1. Initial Lookup & Screening
- Company Name: Screened against Sanctions and Special Interest Entities (SIE).
- Key Roles: Persons in key roles are retrieved and screened for PEP, RCA, SIP, and Sanctions based on your portal's role assignment settings.
2. Monitoring & Ongoing Checks
In the Risk & Workflows > Role Assignment section, you can specify default key roles and decide whether each role should be added to Monitoring:
- Monitored Roles: Automatically registered with the Verified Screening API for ongoing monitoring. Any new watchlist hits trigger an alert in the portal.
- Non-Monitored Roles: Will not receive ongoing alerts, but you can still run manual screenings on these individuals at any time.
3. Reviewing Screening Hits
To inspect a screening hit:
- Locate the person card on the project page.
- Click the eye icon on the card to open match details.
- Review the watchlist information to determine if the hit is a True Match or mark it as a False Positive.
Understanding Name Matching & Scoring
The system uses two complementary scoring mechanics: the Screening API (which finds potential contenders globally) and the AML Portal Display Score (which provides a simple, readable match rating).
How the Screening API Finds & Scores Matches
When a search runs, the Screening API processes names in multiple steps:
- Latinization: Converts non-Latin scripts (e.g., Cyrillic) into Latin characters (e.g., Лукашенко Александр → Lukashenko Aleksandr).
- Diacritics Removal: Strips accents and special characters (e.g., Sophié → Sophie).
- Phonetic Matching (Metaphone 3): Encodes names phonetically to catch spelling variations (e.g., Muhammed and Mahomet both encode to MHMT).
- Filtering: Applies watchlist choices and narrows results by date of birth (when available).
- Note: The portal conducts global PEP screening without filtering by specific country or gender.
Once contenders are found, the API calculates a similarity score based on word-by-word comparisons, account for exact matches, letter distance, diacritics, and phonetic similarity.
How Scores are Displayed in the AML Portal
Rather than showing complex API percentages, the AML Portal re-evaluates each hit locally. It evaluates exact and partial name matches against date of birth (DOB) accuracy to generate a clean score between 5 and 85.
Portal Score | Description Shown | Example (Input Person) | Watchlist Hit Example |
85 | Full name and date of birth match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John Smith, 1990-03-15 |
75 | Full name match, month & year of birth match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John Smith, 1990-03-20 |
75 | Partial name match, full date of birth match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John William Smith, 1990-03-15 |
65 | Full name match, year of birth match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John Smith, 1990-07-01 |
65 | Partial name match, month & year match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John William Smith, 1990-03-20 |
55 | Full name match, no date match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John Smith, 1985-06-10 (or no DOB) |
55 | Partial name match, year of birth match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John William Smith, 1990-07-01 |
45 | Partial name match, no date match | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | John William Smith, 1985-06-10 (or no DOB) |
25 | Date of birth match only | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | Jonathan Smythe, 1990-03-15 |
15 | Month and year of birth match only | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | Jonathan Smythe, 1990-03-20 |
10 | Year of birth match only | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | Jonathan Smythe, 1990-07-01 |
5 | No match on name or date of birth | John Smith, 1990-03-15 | Jonathan Smythe, 1985-06-10 |
Important Note on Score Differences:
The portal display score evaluates exact and partial local string matches. If a hit is identified purely through phonetic or fuzzy matching via the Screening API without an exact string match or DOB match, it may receive a high score in the API but display as a score of 5 in the portal interface.
Screening Thresholds
To reduce false positives, Verified can adjust your portal settings to only receive matches above a chosen score threshold.
- Threshold filtering relies on the primary Screening API score.
- Changes to threshold settings do not work retroactively. Lowering your threshold at a later date will not display previously filtered or ignored matches.
PEP Retention Period
When a person leaves a prominent public role, the Screening API automatically applies an 18-month retention period. Once this 18-month period expires, PEP matches for that former role will no longer be generated. This setting is standard across the platform and is non-configurable.