Glossary
False positive (screening)
A false positive is a screening hit where a customer or payment matches a watchlist entry by name but is not actually the listed person or entity.
False positive (screening) explained
Sanctions and PEP lists contain hundreds of thousands of names, and many are common. Screening deliberately errs on the side of catching possible matches, so most hits turn out to be someone else with a similar name, date of birth or nationality. Each of those hits still has to be reviewed and dismissed by a person, which is where most screening effort goes.
Reducing false positives without missing true matches is a tuning problem: better identifiers such as a national ID number or registry data, entity-type filters, and whitelisting of previously cleared matches all help.
For example, a customer named after a common surname may match several list entries; once a reviewer confirms he is not any of them, that decision should be remembered so the same hit does not return next week.
Why it matters in life insurance
For a Zambian institution screening its whole customer base daily, the review workload is set almost entirely by the false-positive rate, and every dismissal must be defensible to the regulator. ERMAML, the Ontech Risk & Compliance Suite, uses registry-verified identifiers to sharpen matches and keeps a maker-checker whitelist so a cleared match is not re-reviewed unless the underlying data changes.
Related terms
Sanctions screening · PEP (politically exposed person) · Maker-checker (four-eyes principle)