What is a false positive?
An alert raised by a screening engine where the matched record is not in fact the same person or entity as the customer. False positives are unavoidable: the cost of a missed true hit is so high that engines err toward over-matching. Industry norms vary widely but a typical sanctions-screening false-positive rate at major banks is well above 95% of all alerts. Reducing false positives without increasing false negatives is the central engineering challenge of the field.