Neotas, Recognised Again by Chartis. This Time as Best-of-Breed in Adverse Media Monitoring

Industry Recognition, May 2026

Chartis Research evaluated more than 60 vendors in its Watchlist and Adverse Media Monitoring Solutions 2026 report. Neotas was named Best-of-Breed.

That’s the number worth sitting with. Sixty-plus platforms, all making the same category of claims about coverage, accuracy, and compliance output. One independent analyst firm. One Best-of-Breed placement.

It means a lot, not just because of what the recognition is, but because of who’s giving it. Chartis independently assessed vendors across coverage depth, signal quality, and the ability to produce findings that compliance teams can actually stand behind. We didn’t pitch them a demo and a slide deck. They looked at the work.

This is also the second time in the same cycle that Chartis has recognised Neotas. Earlier this year we were named a Market Disruptor in the Chartis FCC50 2026, winning category awards for Know Your Third Party and Supply Chain Excellence. Two different reports. Two entirely different vendor sets. Same conclusion.

We’re proud of that.

Why adverse media monitoring is harder than it sounds

Most people in compliance already know the frustration. You run a screening check, you get back a wall of alerts, half of which are about a different person with the same name, a quarter of which are duplicates from different outlets covering the same story, and somewhere in the remaining pile is the signal that actually matters. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the daily reality for risk teams working at any kind of scale.

The problem isn’t a shortage of data. It’s that most adverse media platforms are essentially database re-sellers. They ingest the same licensed news feeds, surface the same matches, and leave the judgment call — real risk or noise? — entirely with the analyst.

That works, up to a point. But there’s a whole category of risk that never makes it into a licensed feed. Regional court filings. Social media threads in languages that don’t get translated. Forum posts on platforms that don’t get indexed. Archived content that tells you something about a pattern of behaviour rather than a single event. Annual reviews miss all of this because the monitoring window is too narrow. Point-in-time screening misses all of this because the check was clean on onboarding day, and things changed.

This is the part of the problem that Neotas was built to solve.

What the Chartis Best-of-Breed designation actually recognises

Chartis doesn’t give this placement to the platform with the most features. Best-of-Breed means you lead on depth in your domain — that within the specific capability being assessed, your output quality clears a bar that broader platforms don’t.

For adverse media monitoring, that bar comes down to three things: can you find the signal, can you tell whether it’s real, and can you produce something a regulator would accept as evidence?

The Neotas platform searches across the open web, deep web, dark web, social media, and archived digital content, across 100+ jurisdictions in 30+ native languages. Not translation. Native-language execution, which means a risk signal written in Arabic or Mandarin or Portuguese is found in the original source, not approximated through a filter.

What happens after the search is where most platforms fall short — and where Neotas is built differently. A suite of specialised agentic AI agents runs the full investigation workflow without a human having to manage the steps. One agent handles entity disambiguation and alias resolution. Another removes false positives so analysts aren’t wading through noise. A risk-scoring agent applies the client’s own framework to every confirmed finding, consistently, at scale. And a final agent generates a structured report in the client’s own template, with full source attribution, ready to go.

The whole process — intake to formatted, audit-ready output — runs in 15 to 20 minutes. That’s not a compression of the analyst’s job. That’s agentic AI doing the parts of the job that don’t require human judgment, so analysts can focus on the parts that do.

Regulators increasingly want to see not just what was found, but why a hit was escalated or discounted. Every step every agent takes is automatically recorded and tamper-proof. That’s what audit-ready actually means.

What continuous monitoring looks like when it’s working properly

One of the things we hear consistently from compliance teams is that annual reviews feel increasingly indefensible. Not because the intent is wrong, but because a third party that was clean at onboarding can be sanctioned, implicated, or structurally changed at any point in the 12 months that follow — and a once-a-year check won’t catch it.

Neotas monitors every subject continuously, including across the channels that licensed feed-based platforms don’t reach. When something changes — a sanctions designation, an adverse media development, a shift in ownership structure, a signal in the deep web — the alert goes out, and it gets pushed via API into whatever system the compliance team is already working in. No manual transfer, no reporting lag, and a DORA-aligned audit trail on every event.

This matters more now than it did three years ago. Regulatory expectations around ongoing monitoring have moved. The standard is no longer “did you check at onboarding.” It’s “would you have seen it if it changed.”

Two recognitions, one year – what it tells us

We’re not going to pretend that analyst recognition is the point of the work. The point is building something that actually helps compliance teams do their jobs better, in environments where the cost of a missed signal is real.

But independent validation matters, particularly in a market where vendor claims are easy to make and hard to verify. When Chartis selects Neotas as Best-of-Breed from a field of 60+ vendors, assessed across a specific and technically demanding capability, it tells the market something that we can’t tell them ourselves: that the platform performs.

The FCC50 recognition earlier this year told us the same thing about a different capability set. Two reports, two independent assessments, the same period. That consistency is what we’re most pleased about.