A news monitoring system to detect relevant news for the anti-money laundering supervision of financial institutions

Investigative journalism plays a pivotal role in uncovering financial misconduct, yet its integration into anti-money laundering (AML) supervision remains underexplored. This paper presents a data-driven media monitoring system designed to provide timely alerts on news articles relevant to AML oversight in financial institutions. The system produces early-warning risk signals, offering actionable insights for qualitative assessments by micro-prudential supervisors. Relevance is quantified through thematic and entity-specific keywords, with these scores aggregated into weekly risk indicators. Through event analysis, we demonstrate the system's effectiveness by examining how Belgian newspapers covered eight offshore leaks between 2013 and 2021. Furthermore, we assess the system's robustness to machine translation and explore the use of prompting as an alternative methodology. The findings highlight the potential of integrating news-based alerts into AML supervision, enhancing the monitoring and response capabilities of supervisory authorities.