OakNorth Bank, a leading UK digital bank for SMEs and fast-growth businesses, faced a common challenge in financial crime compliance: an overwhelming volume of false positives from adverse media screening. Compliance teams were spending countless hours sifting through irrelevant alerts, slowing down customer onboarding and ongoing monitoring.

By implementing Arva AI’s Adverse Media Screening AI, OakNorth was able to reduce noise, focus on true risks, and dramatically improve operational efficiency.

Challenge

• High false positive rates in adverse media screening.

• Compliance analysts manually reviewing articles that were irrelevant, outdated, or duplicated.

• Slower customer onboarding and increased operational costs.

• Need for explainable AI to meet regulator expectations without introducing "black box" risk.

Solution

OakNorth integrated Arva AI’s Screening AI agents, specifically leveraging Adverse Media to:

• Filter and categorize news in real time, discounting irrelevant or outdated hits.

• Contextualize articles by distinguishing between individuals with the same or similar names.

• Explain decisions transparently, showing why an article was flagged or discounted.

• Enable analyst-in-the-loop feedback, allowing continuous improvement and audit-ready rationales.

Results

• 80% reduction in adverse media alerts requiring manual review.

• Significant time savings for compliance teams, freeing analysts to focus on true risks.

• Faster customer onboarding and monitoring workflows.

• Increased confidence from audit and regulatory teams through transparent, explainable outputs.

About Arva AI

Arva AI helps banks, fintechs, and financial institutions scale their compliance operations through agentic AI. Backed by Y Combinator and the Google AI Fund, Arva’s platform provides explainable, audit-ready AI agents for AML, KYC, KYB, and screening.

With Arva, compliance teams reduce false positives, accelerate onboarding, and strengthen financial crime defenses — without adding headcount.