Insight vs. Noise: What Your Screening Program Isn't Catching
Is your screening program finding risk, or just processing alerts?
Sanctions and watchlist screening programs generate enormous volumes of alerts. But processing more alerts does not necessarily mean identifying more risk.
In this on-demand panel from ACAMS Las Vegas 2026, experts from SymphonyAI and PwC explore what makes a screening program genuinely effective, and how financial institutions can move beyond measuring alert volumes toward demonstrating that their controls are identifying the risks that matter.
The discussion examines the factors that can undermine screening effectiveness, from poor data quality and overly broad rules to missing transaction context, inconsistent investigations and gaps in the underlying risk-based approach.
You'll also hear how AI is changing sanctions and watchlist screening. The panel explores practical applications across alert triage, investigation, contextual enrichment, list management, tuning and quality assurance, while considering the governance, human oversight and explainability needed to use AI responsibly.
Ultimately, effective screening isn't simply about reducing false positives. It's about improving risk coverage, identifying what traditional controls may be missing and giving investigators the context they need to make better decisions.
What you'll learn
Discover how financial institutions can:
- Assess whether screening programs are identifying the right risk, not simply processing more alerts
- Improve sanctions and watchlist screening through better data quality, tuning and contextual intelligence
- Reduce false positives while identifying potential false negatives and hidden risk
- Use AI to enrich alerts, accelerate investigations and improve consistency
- Strengthen screening governance, transparency and explainability
- Apply a risk-based approach to screening rather than relying on check-the-box controls
- Balance AI automation with appropriate human judgment and oversight
Speakers
Jay Yesinko
VP North America, SymphonyAI
Brian Ferro
Product Director, Compliance, SymphonyAI
Julien Chanier
Partner, Sanctions Technology and AI Lead, PwC
Access the full webinar
Regulators increasingly expect institutions to demonstrate that screening controls work in practice, not simply that they exist.
Watch the webinar to explore how better data, contextual intelligence, risk-based controls and AI can help financial institutions cut through screening noise and focus resources on the risks that matter.
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An effective sanctions screening program should identify relevant risk rather than simply generate and process large volumes of alerts. That requires appropriate data quality, screening coverage, tuning, contextual information, documented decision-making and controls aligned with the institution's risk profile.
Broad screening rules, fuzzy matching, limited contextual information and data-quality issues can all contribute to high false-positive volumes. Effective programs should examine the root causes of unnecessary alerts rather than relying solely on downstream suppression. The panel makes this latter point particularly strongly in its closing recommendations.
AI can support alert triage, enrich investigations with contextual information, assist with watchlist management and tuning, identify exceptions and perform quality assurance across screening controls. It can also help institutions test larger populations rather than relying solely on samples.
Risk-based screening considers an institution's customers, transactions, jurisdictions, products and risk appetite when determining what and how to screen. This can help institutions move beyond uniform, check-the-box screening toward controls proportionate to the risks they actually face.
AI may increasingly automate lower-level alert triage and straightforward decisions, while humans remain important for complex cases requiring research, judgment and oversight. The panel anticipates greater automation of Level 1 work but emphasizes continued human involvement and governance for more complex decisions.
Brian Ferro, CAMS, is the Compliance Product Director at SymphonyAI, where he leads the strategic direction of the company’s AML Compliance solutions suite. He focuses on harnessing emerging technologies to drive innovation and enhance the effectiveness of financial crime detection. A certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS), Brian brings over 25 years of experience in Anti-Financial Crime, spanning both practitioner and vendor perspectives. His career includes key roles within Financial Intelligence Units at leading financial institutions, as well as extensive work in Product Management, where he has shaped strategy and developed use cases to meet evolving regulatory and business needs.