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4. Read the prescreening

The Prescreening tab is the cheapest thing on the case to read, and the reason to read it first is that it tells you where the expensive tabs are worth spending money.

The empty prescreening tab with a Run prescreening button
Nothing runs unasked. The button is behind a confirmation that says what it costs.

Press Run prescreening. It takes a few minutes, because a model is searching the public web, opening pages and reading them, and the tab watches for the answer. You can go and do something else: leaving the page does not lose the answer.

A completed prescreening report showing the risk assessment, identification, ownership, governance, financials and regulatory history

Identification, ownership, governance, financials, regulatory history, and a Low / Medium / High assessment with its reasoning.

How to read it​

It establishes nothing. Everything else on the case comes from somewhere accountable (a register, a bought document, a watchlist check) and is worth what its source is worth. This is a model reading the public web. The risk assessment is a heading with a rationale, not a verdict.

The sources are the part you can check, which is why every report ends in them. Two lists come back and are kept apart:

  • Sources: the handful the model wrote into the report itself, titled and dated, the ones it stands behind.
  • Pages consulted: everything a search opened, including what it read and then passed over. Folded away under its own heading.
The sources list at the end of a prescreening report, with the pages consulted section collapsed under it
The cited sources, and under them every page the searches opened.

They often coincide exactly. When they differ, the pages read and passed over are the ones nobody could otherwise know about.

What it feeds​

Two things, both free:

  • Half of what a prescreening contains matches the identity block by name, so it lands in the Fields tab as a fourth, weaker source, labelled as such and cited with the report's own links. A report bought for one purpose answers the identity block for nothing.
  • On a case with no register behind it, its shareholder list is offered as the first draft of the ownership structure.

Asking again​

A prescreening is a paid answer, and the report survives the run that carried it. Reports stack up, oldest folded away, so what did it say last month stays answerable. Asking again is Discard then Run, two acts, deliberately, because "refresh" would be the wrong word for something that re-bills.

If the tab says prescreening is not configured

The model access it needs has not been set up on your deployment. Everything else on the case still works. Ask support.

Next: Discover the ownership.

Going deeper: Prescreening