RENO, Nev., May 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- KYC SiteScan, the leading provider of automated merchant due diligence, announces the availability of five new AI-powered features to transform the payment processing industry's merchant Know Your Customer (KYC) process.

Unlike general AI applications, these new capabilities are uniquely grounded in real-time data from trusted primary sources, ensuring insights are backed by clear data provenance.

As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, financial institutions and payment providers need more than automated AI summaries; they require verifiable truth from the freshest data. KYC SiteScan's latest suite of tools leverages AI while maintaining a "glass-box" approach that allows underwriters and auditors to trace KYC findings back to their origins.

1. Adverse Media Detection
   Moving beyond simple keyword matching from legacy Adverse Media services, this AI tool scans real-time news, regulatory announcements, legal filings, bankruptcy, and law enforcement documentation to identify contextually relevant negative information about merchants and their principals. Similar names are disambiguated to provide accurate adverse risk alerts. This feature is configurable for clients to define their own Adverse Media screening criteria such as filtering results by date, region, language, and types of information sources.
    
2. Merchant Data Validation
   Cross-references merchant-provided information against government primary sources and public records. AI identifies discrepancies in business names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, owner/officer and registration details, company structure, including nonprofit status, and data validation issues that may justify enhanced merchant due diligence.
    
3. Consumer Sentiment Analysis
   Analyzing customer reviews and feedback from direct API connections to trusted consumer sources plus a broad grounded search for consumer commentary across the Internet enhanced by AI, this feature provides a real-time pulse on a merchant's reputation with its first-party consumers. It identifies and categorizes patterns of consumer satisfaction, dissatisfaction or potential fraud indicators.
    
4. MCC Suggestions
   Leveraging AI to analyze website content and business classification, this feature accurately suggests up to three Merchant Category Codes (MCC) per merchant, with detailed reasoning and confidence scores.
    
5. Website URL and Social Media Discovery
   Identifies a merchant's online footprint, uncovering undisclosed websites associated with a business.
   
   KYC SiteScan's internal research reveals a significant transparency gap in the industry: nearly 50% of merchant applicants fail to disclose a business URL. Among these undisclosed applicants, KYC SiteScan identifies that almost half maintain one or more active websites, with approximately 20% of those undisclosed sites processing e-commerce transactions.
   
   Many merchants conduct business from social media sites. This feature detects if ecommerce is performed at discovered website, marketplace, or social media URLs. The feature also detects URLs where business registration information can help underwriters further confirm business legitimacy.

Grounded AI: Accuracy Through Provenance
While many AI tools are prone to inaccurate results and "hallucinations," KYC SiteScan's models are anchored to primary source data. AI-generated insight is accompanied by the specific source from which it was derived, providing the data provenance necessary to satisfy internal audits and external examiners.

"Efficiency shouldn't come at the cost of integrity," said Matthew Parker, Principal at KYC SiteScan. "By grounding AI in "real data", obtained in realtime, we are giving merchant underwriting teams the best of both worlds: the insights of artificial intelligence and the reliability of verified data provenance."

These five new AI features are now available in KYC SiteScan's reports and API Risk Data.

About KYC SiteScan
KYC SiteScan is the payment industry's premier provider of KYC automation, providing real-time data analysis from merchant website screening, data validation, merchant legitimacy verification, consumer sentiment analysis, adverse media flagging, government database checks, and required industry compliance.

For more information visit KYCsystems.com

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SOURCE KYC Systems LLC