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For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://docs.coverbase.com/llms.txt. This page is also available in markdown by appending .md to the URL.
This guide is part of the User Guides collection. Screening is a tab in every vendor’s Vendor Intelligence section, plus a queue of its own.
Corporate registrations tell you the company is real. People intelligence tells you who runs it. This page tells you whether the company or those people appear on a sanctions, watchlist, criminal or legal source - not once at onboarding, but on a schedule, for as long as you keep the vendor. Two things make it different from the rest of Vendor Intelligence, and both are worth reading before you use it. Every screen is recorded, including the clear ones. “We screened this vendor on this date, against these sources, and found nothing” is the artifact an examiner asks for. A missing record proves nothing, so the vendor page shows the run history whether or not there is anything to review. The score is about identity, not severity. This is the single most misread number on the page, so it has its own section below.

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Where it lives

Screening appears in two places, and they are for two different jobs. On a vendor - open a vendor, go to Vendor Intelligence, and pick the Screening tab. This is the view when you already care about one supplier.
The Screening tab for a vendor, showing an open sanctions match, its identity confidence, and the history of scheduled screens.

1 Open matches, worst source first. 2 Identity confidence. 3 The run history, including clear screens.

In the review queue - Screening in the left navigation. Every open match across every vendor, oldest first. This is the view when your job is to clear the queue rather than to look at one vendor.
The screening review queue showing open matches across several vendors, with counts for matches needing review and the age of the oldest one.

The org-wide queue. Matches from different vendors in one list, oldest first.

The queue is deliberately separate from Findings. A screening match is triaged on a different question from the rest of your work - is this listed record actually this vendor? - and mixing it into a general work queue buries the one kind of alert that carries a regulatory deadline.

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Identity confidence is not severity

Every match carries a score. It answers one question: how confident are we that this listed record is this vendor? It does not tell you how serious the listing is. A match at 0.95 against an adverse-media article means we are confident the article is about this subject, not that the article is damning. A confirmed sanctions listing at 0.72 is far more urgent than a high-confidence mention in a news story.
Read the source, not the score. The score decides whether it is them. The listing decides what it means.
Screening runs on thin identity data - a name, usually a country, sometimes a registration number, almost never a date of birth. That is genuinely not much to match on, so false positives are expected and are not a defect. A common surname or a generic trading name will produce candidates that are not your vendor. Clearing those is the job, which is why the queue exists.

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Reading a match

Open any match to get the full record.
The match review drawer showing the screened subject, the flagged source, country, registration number, aliases, programmes, a field-level match breakdown, and the source listing.

The review drawer: what matched, field by field, with the sources behind it.

Work down it in this order:
  1. Screened subject vs matched name. The two names side by side. This is usually enough to rule out an obvious mismatch.
  2. Country and registration number. The strongest discriminators available. A registration number that matches is close to conclusive; a country that does not match is a strong signal it is a different entity.
  3. Also known as. Transliterations and former names. A vendor that looks unrelated in English can match exactly in its own script.
  4. Field-level match. Which attributes actually agreed, and how strongly. A high overall score built only on the name is weaker than a lower score built on name and registration.
  5. Sources. The listing itself. Follow it before you decide.
The automated read is advisory. It is there for context and Coverbase never closes a match on it - a person decides, always.

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Deciding

Three outcomes, and a written reason is required for all of them. The reason becomes part of the audit trail, so write it for someone reading it in a year with none of your context.
An allowlist expires on purpose. Circumstances change, and a permanent suppression is how a real listing goes unnoticed for years.
Confirming a match opens a finding, so it picks up an owner, a due date, SLA reminders and the rest of the findings workflow. Screening raises the alert; it does not decide what you do about it, and it never blocks a payment or an onboarding on its own.

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What “clear” looks like

A vendor with nothing to review still shows its run history.
The Screening tab for a vendor with no open matches, showing the history of completed screens with dates and the sources covered.

No open matches. The screens still show, with their dates and sources.

An empty match list and a vendor that was never screened look similar and mean opposite things. Check the run history before you write “no sanctions exposure” into an assessment.

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Settings

An administrator configures screening once, under Configuration → External integrations → Screening. It needs the integration permission, not the screening one.
The screening settings page showing the connection status, source toggles, adverse media categories, subject selection, and the monitoring table by vendor tier.

The policy: which sources, who gets screened, and which vendor tiers are monitored.

Four things to decide: Which sources. Sanctions, PEP, criminal and legal are on by default. Adverse media is off, and should stay off until the rest is running cleanly - it is the highest-volume and lowest-precision source, and it will dominate your queue. When you do turn it on, keep the category list narrow. Who gets screened. The vendor’s legal entity is screened by default. Directors, officers and beneficial owners are opt-in, because screening a person means storing watchlist assertions about a named individual. Turn them on deliberately. Which tiers are monitored. A monitored vendor is re-screened on a schedule and raises an alert when a source changes.
The monitoring table listing each vendor tier with a monitored switch and an optional provider profile group.

Monitoring is per vendor tier. The profile group is optional.

Tier 4 and untiered vendors are unmonitored by default, so switching screening on does not silently enrol your entire long tail - a monitored vendor is a standing subscription, not a one-off charge.
How often each source is re-screened is set in your screening provider’s own configuration, not in Coverbase. Coverbase decides who is monitored; the provider decides how often. If you need a tighter or looser schedule for a group of vendors, set up a profile group with your provider and name it in the table - leaving it blank uses the provider’s workspace default.
The match threshold. The default is 0.80. Lower it and you will see more true matches and many more false ones; raise it and you risk missing a real listing on thin data. Change it only with a reason you would defend to an auditor.
A source switched off at the top level never runs, whatever the monitoring table says. One switch turns a source off everywhere, rather than making you clear a row per tier.

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Who can do what

Screening has its own permission, separate from the vendor record, so the person who reviews matches need not be the person who administers vendors. There is no create or delete. Matches come from the provider and are closed by decision, never removed.