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Every screening hit comes back with a percentage and a band. This page explains how we get from “what we found” to that number, then walks through three cases.

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How the score works

The band — Low, Medium or High — is the decision signal. It drives alerts, and a High fails an automated identity check outright. The percentage is the detail behind it: how much corroborating evidence sits inside that band. Rule one — the band is the single worst finding. One sanctions listing makes a case High, and nothing in the record talks it back down. Equally, twenty minor findings stay Low — volume never escalates a band. Rule two — the percentage moves only inside that band. Extra findings of the same severity raise the number with sharply diminishing returns, and it is capped so it can never spill into the band above.

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How factors combine

Each risk factor starts from a base weight set by its severity: Factors are combined probabilistically: two factors with weights a and b give 1 − (1 − a) × (1 − b). Repeated factors of the same severity are scaled down logarithmically, so each one adds less than the one before — that is why two Low factors add 5.5%, not 10%. The result is then capped at the top of the band set by the most severe factor.
A clean search reports Low, not blank. Zero matches and a minor finding look alike at a glance, so read the hit count alongside the band.

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Worked examples

Cases 1 and 2 are constructed illustrations. Case 3 follows production scoring of a real, heavily sanctioned record, anonymised here. Percentages are rounded.

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Case 1 · Country risk alone

A clean individual whose only exposure is where he is from. John Doe Person System default profile One hit, on a national company register — he is listed as a director. No sanctions, no adverse media, no enforcement history. His citizenship is a jurisdiction on the FATF grey list. Medium 30% · Low 5.5% (2 factors) → 1 − (1 − 0.30) × (1 − 0.055) = 0.34
🟡 34% · Medium — Nothing in his own history is serious. The grey-listed jurisdiction alone lifts him out of Low, which is exactly what a grey listing is meant to signal.
We read the FATF lists live, so a country moving on or off the grey list changes this score on the next screening — no configuration change needed.

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Case 2 · The client’s own country rule

The same clean record, but the client has told us which jurisdictions they will not accept. John Doe Inc. Company Custom profile A Venezuelan-registered company with one hit, on a national company register. Nothing adverse at all. This client’s rulebook sets Venezuela to High for companies and Medium for individuals. High 70% · Low 5.5% (2 factors) → 1 − (1 − 0.70) × (1 − 0.055) = 0.72
🔴 72% · High — A spotless company scores High purely on the client’s own country policy. Run the identical record as an individual and the same rulebook returns Medium instead.
This is the strongest lever a compliance team has. Country policy is set per client, separately for individuals and companies, and it overrides the FATF default for that country.

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Case 3 · A saturated record

A heavily sanctioned individual, screened on the default profile — what the ceiling looks like. Jane Roe Person System default profile Matched at full-name confidence against 13 lists, with three citizenships. We never score a record whole — it is broken into individually rateable risk factors, and this one yields 37. High × 24 factors · Medium × 1 · Low × 12 → capped at 1.00
🔴 100% · High — Twelve independent government listings, each High on its own. The score saturates: as unambiguous as a screening result gets.
Two things are worth noticing. The score reaches the 100% cap well before the last listing is counted — repeated findings have diminishing returns, so the tenth sanctions list cannot count as much as the second. And geography contributed almost nothing: the default profile sets no country policy of its own, so the citizenships were read straight from FATF and all came back Low. Case 2 is what happens when a client changes that.

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The rulebook behind the numbers

None of these severities are hardcoded. Each client has a risk profile deciding what counts as serious. The default ships with these positions:

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What overrides what

Severity comes from the risk profile first and from the data itself second: Country factors are read from citizenships, nationalities and addresses. Tags are read from source tags only.
Source settings are the most powerful part of a risk profile: they replace each list’s own rating, so this is where your organisation’s own view of a list belongs.
Profiles are versioned, and every result records which profile and version produced it — so a score from six months ago can always be explained.

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Worth knowing

  • Volume never escalates a band. Fifty Medium findings still read Medium. Deliberate — it stops a noisy record manufacturing a High — but it means the band alone doesn’t convey how much evidence sits behind it. That is the percentage’s job.
  • Only strong name matches raise the case. Every matched record gets its own score, but it only lifts the overall search result if the name matched at high confidence. A High-risk record on a weak name stays visible to the analyst without escalating the case.
  • Labels are read per listing. A record carries a rolled-up label summary, but only the labels attached to each individual listing are scored. A label that appears in the summary and nowhere on a listing adds nothing.

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Next steps

AML Search

Run one-time AML searches and read the same score.

Daily Monitoring

Get alerted when a score changes.

API Reference

All parameters and response formats.