If your investigations seem reactive, you’re not alone. Many financial institutions experience this. One day, the news breaks, and a name starts to appear in discussions, while your queues stay oddly quiet. Then, days later, the alerts arrive. By then, the damage has already occurred, the pressure increases, and the case report turns into a frantic scramble.
12 January 2026
Here’s the issue. In many financial crime teams, the slowdown isn’t due to analysts being slow. It’s signals that often arrive late or provide so little background that analysts must do the heavy lifting themselves. This is when even a strong compliance program feels like it’s always trying to catch up.
This post will guide you through three practical steps:
- Identify where detection latency impacts your AML and KYC processes.
- Measure it using timestamps you already possess.
- Reduce it by incorporating structured external signals, including OSINT, without overwhelming your team with noise.
TL;DR
If your FinCrime investigations feel slow, it’s often because the signal arrives late, not because your team is. In this post, you’ll spot the three most common detection delays, measure your own latency with four simple timestamps, and see how structured OSINT and news signals can cut triage time without drowning analysts in noise.
Most teams don’t need more alerts. They need earlier, cleaner context.
OSINT stands for open source intelligence. In this context, it involves utilising publicly accessible sources such as news, public reports, and web content as a reliable signal layer for investigations. It is not a random Google search spiral, but a structured, trackable approach suited for regulatory compliance.
What detection latency actually means
Detection latency is the duration from a real-world event to the moment your team observes it, trusts it, and can respond.
That sounds simple, but it matters because it’s a different problem from “slow investigations”.
Slow investigations typically indicate problems with team capacity, training, or processes. Late detection suggests issues with upstream visibility. The signal either arrives too late or is too weak to be useful.
If you want faster, more defensible decisions, speeding up signals is often the highest leverage move you can make. It directly supports stronger risk assessment, especially when you’re dealing with high-risk entities, relationships, or jurisdictions.
The four timestamps that reveal your real latency
You don’t need a new framework, a new tool, or a major transformation programme to gain clarity. Begin with four timestamps.
- Event time
What happened in the world. - First mention time
When it first appears publicly, often in local outlets, niche trade press, or non-English sources. - Internal awareness time
When your monitoring, alerting, or intake process makes it visible to your team, whether through a transaction monitoring system, adverse media screening, or ongoing monitoring. - Decision time
When the case is disposed of, escalated, or documented for the audit trail.
Most teams already monitor internal awareness time and decision time within case management. You can often estimate first mention time by checking when a story first appears in public reporting. This provides a baseline for the AML investigation process and highlights where time is lost from the workflow.
A quick exercise you can run this week
Pick 10 closed cases from the last month.
For each case, pull:
- Alert created time
- Assigned time
- First enrichment time
- Decision time
Then ask one uncomfortable but useful question:
What did we learn about the outside world after we had already made the call?
That’s your latency gap. It’s also where OSINT can help, as it can surface public red-flag indicators earlier and add context to them.
Where latency sneaks into AML and KYC workflows
Latency is seldom caused by a single major failure. It typically slips in through daily friction within financial systems.
Here are the usual suspects:
- Batching: Data refresh cycles mean you see yesterday’s world, not real-time risk signals.
- Manual enrichment: Analysts spend time searching for context instead of making decisions.
- Disjointed tools: Monitoring and case systems don’t share context clearly.
- Thresholds set too high: you wait for confirmation rather than suspicion.
- Noise fatigue: Too many low-quality hits train teams to ignore alerts.
- Coverage blind spots: Signals emerge in areas your current stack does not monitor, particularly across languages and local sources.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re managing modern complexity with workflows that weren’t designed for it. When regulators or internal audit pose questions later, these gaps can turn into a regulatory compliance issue rather than just an efficiency concern.
Three concrete examples of slow signals in current setups
1: An enforcement action or investigation mention arrives after the decision window
What happens in the world: A regulator opens an investigation, issues a penalty, or names an entity in a public action. Early mentions appear in official notices, specialist outlets, or regional reporting before the story reaches mainstream channels. Sometimes law enforcement involvement becomes public gradually, which is exactly why teams miss the first signals.
What the current setup observes and when: Your transaction monitoring system remains silent. Your sanctions lists do not update. Your adverse media checks might detect issues later, especially if they depend on a limited set of sources or a periodic review schedule. Meanwhile, the business seeks answers, and your risk assessment is falling behind real-world developments.
What the analyst ends up doing: Someone flags it during a meeting, or a relationship manager forwards a link. Now the analyst must:
- Validate the story.
- Gather evidence.
- Trace the entity and any aliases
- Explain why it is relevant to the decision and whether it requires enhanced due diligence
That’s genuine work, but it’s often regarded as glue work. It consumes time and poses defensibility risks because the case file begins with “we noticed this late.”
What changes with structured OSINT signals
If you integrate external news and OSINT signals that activate on relevant entities and topics, you can detect the initial mention earlier and include it in the workflow with context attached. This often results in:
- Faster triage because the story is already. summarised and grouped
- Quicker escalation when it is truly significant.
- More precise documentation of what you knew and when, which is important when regulatory bodies inquire why a red flag was not addressed sooner.
2: Changes in beneficial ownership and control appear during a periodic review
What happens in the world: Control changes. A new director appears. A parent organisation shifts. Or a key individual becomes associated with controversy that impacts risk. In practice, these signals appear in public reports, corporate disclosures, and regional business press, sometimes alongside indicators of potential money-laundering risk.
What the current setup sees and when: If your ongoing monitoring depends on periodic review cycles, you often identify changes weeks or months later. By that time, you have onboarded transactions, renewed relationships, or continued services based on an outdated risk picture. If the customer is high risk, that’s not just awkward; it’s dangerous.
What the analyst ends up doing: The analyst must react quickly, often under time pressure:
- Collect documentation.
- Escalate internally.
- Handle uncomfortable outreach.
- Rebuild the risk narrative after the event, including whether enhanced due diligence should have been initiated earlier.
It becomes a fire drill, and nobody enjoys those.
What changes with external signals
You can use OSINT and external news signals as an early warning rather than a full alert. When done correctly, it prompts a targeted review of the specific entity and the particular change, rather than a blanket reassessment. The typical results are:
- Less disruption.
- Less manual chasing.
- Better audit defensibility because you can demonstrate continuous awareness rather than periodic surprises.
- A stronger, more timely risk assessment that supports the overall AML compliance programme.
3: Local first coverage never enters your queue
What happens in the world: A regional scandal emerges. A local court filing gets reported. A small outlet publishes credible allegations. Or a business partner is named in a story that never gains momentum in English-language media. This is common in cases linked to corruption, fraud, sanctions evasion, and even terrorist financing networks, where early reporting is fragmented and local.
What the current setup sees and when: If your monitoring relies heavily on major English sources, you might not detect the signal at all. Or you only notice it after it has passed through larger outlets, which can take days. Sometimes it never propagates, meaning your transaction-monitoring system bears the full burden without the external context that makes suspicious patterns easier to identify.
What the analyst ends up doing: Often, nothing happens until a regulator, auditor, or internal stakeholder asks, “Were we aware of this?” That’s a difficult moment, because you either say no or scramble to reconstruct the timeline.
What changes with non-English aware OSINT signals
If you include broader language coverage and sensible filtering, you can identify first mentions earlier, even when they originate in local reporting. This does not mean you alert on everything. It means you:
- Detect earlier.
- Translate or summarise enough to triage.
- Route the signal only when it exceeds defined relevance thresholds, so analysts see genuine red flag indicators rather than noise.
That’s how you reduce blind spots without turning the queue into chaos.
What changes when you add external news signals the right way
A well-designed external signal layer does not replace transaction monitoring.
It complements it.
You typically see four practical improvements:
- Faster triage: spend less time verifying basic facts.
- Better routing: ensure the right cases reach the right people sooner.
- Stronger case narratives: document the timeline clearly and consistently.
- Fewer blind spots: detect signals that are absent from your current sources, especially outside English-language media.
The benefit is not just speed. It’s confidence. The team can make decisions that withstand scrutiny, whether questions come from internal audit, senior leadership, or regulatory bodies.
A practical checklist to reduce latency without drowning analysts
If you want to start small and maintain control, use this checklist:
✅ Start with a limited set of high-risk entities, watchlists, and topics.
✅ Use entity controls to match the correct organisation, not just the most common name.
✅ Apply source tiers to prioritise credibility and relevance.
✅ Define routing rules based on entity risk, topic type, and severity.
✅ Track time-to-signal and time-to-decision as operational KPIs.
✅ Make it easy to demonstrate how the signal supported a decision for regulatory compliance reviews.
If analysts don’t trust the signal, they won’t use it. Build for trust first.
What to do next
If this post resonated, the next step is straightforward: map your latency, pick one workflow choke point, and test a controlled signal layer that reduces manual enrichment.
In February, we’ll go deeper into the other half of the problem: how to design adverse media screening that doesn’t drown analysts. We’ll cover precision versus recall, deduplication, and smart filtering you can actually operationalise.
And on March 23rd, we’re releasing a longer gated guide: Closing Detection Latency in Financial Crime with External News Signals. If you want it when it drops, sign up to get it sent straight to you. It’s built to be practical, with checklists you can use internally.
Because when signals arrive earlier and cleaner, decisions get easier. That’s the point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Start with what you already track: alert created, assigned, first enrichment, decision. Then add a proxy for first mention by using the earliest credible public reference you can find for that case type, like a regulator notice, court update, or reputable local report. Track median times and segment by case type. You’ll get a baseline you can improve without needing perfect external timestamps.
Treat OSINT like any other evidence source. Define which sources and event types are actionable, use source tiers so credibility drives routing, and log URL, timestamp, and rationale when it influences a decision. Use structured matching where possible, not just keywords. The aim is consistency: if an auditor asks why you acted, you can show the logic and the trail.
Don’t rely on keyword tightening alone. Instead, cluster duplicates into one story thread, route alerts based on entity risk tier and severity, and use response lanes like log, review, escalate. Add a simple analyst feedback option, relevant or not relevant, so tuning improves over time. You’ll cut busywork while keeping early warning coverage for high risk entities.
Talk to a data specialist
