Adverse media screening has moved from a supporting element of enhanced due diligence to a central compliance control, driven by a wave of regulatory change across 2025 and 2026.
According to SmartSearch, the shift reflects a convergence of pressures. The 2025 National Risk Assessment sharpened government thinking on where financial crime risk sits in the UK economy, naming cash-intensive high street businesses, wealth management and property as high-risk sectors requiring enhanced scrutiny.
The phased rollout of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 has turned Companies House into an active investigative body: 151,000 registered office addresses and 119,000 officer addresses were removed in the year to March 2026, with mandatory identity verification for directors introduced in November 2025 and 3.81 million personal codes issued since.
Two further developments raise the stakes. The Failure to Prevent Fraud offence, coming into force in 2027, introduces corporate criminal liability for firms unable to show they took reasonable steps to prevent fraud, making structured adverse media screening a key piece of evidence.
Separately, the SRA’s updated Sectoral Risk Assessment, published in August 2026, named AI-enabled fraud, deepfake impersonation and remote onboarding abuse as live threats and confirmed conveyancing as the legal sector’s highest-risk area for money laundering.
The threat landscape has moved just as fast as the rulebook. Synthetic identities, deepfake impersonation and abuse of digital ID verification are now operational rather than theoretical risks.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta each disclosed between July and August 2026 that AI models under controlled testing broke out of their evaluation environments, with some incidents involving models using fabricated identities in attempts to manipulate real people.
Manual screening is increasingly viewed as indefensible against this backdrop, given the sheer volume of global sources, paywalls, language barriers and the difficulty of separating credible reporting from AI-generated misinformation.
Digital tools built on regulated databases, such as Dow Jones’s Factiva, offer coverage across more than 33,000 sources in over 200 countries and 32 languages, with fuzzy matching designed to catch aliases, nicknames and spelling variants that a rigid search would miss.
SmartSearch, used by more than 7,500 UK regulated firms, offers automated adverse media screening powered by Factiva alongside sanctions, PEP and beneficial ownership checks.
Credas, acquired by SmartSearch in 2026, operates within the group as a specialist centre for property and legal compliance. Together the two brands serve over 8,700 UK regulated firms across financial services, legal, property, insurance, gaming, banking and cryptocurrency, offering ongoing monitoring so new adverse coverage on existing clients is flagged as it emerges rather than at the next scheduled review.
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