This article explains Hit reason: how it works for transaction/rule alerts, how it works for screening hits, and where to find it in the console.
Overview
Hit reason is Flagright's explainability feature: instead of an analyst having to manually reverse-engineer why an alert was created, the console shows the exact rule logic or screening match that triggered it, using the real values from that specific transaction, user, or screening result.
The feature has two related but separate halves:
Transaction/rule hit reason: shown on an alert's Transactions tab, for transaction monitoring and user monitoring rules.
Screening hit reason: shown on screening hit results, focused on match quality (fuzziness/similarity score) rather than rule logic.
1. Hit reason for transaction and rule alerts
On an alert's Transactions tab, each transaction that contributed to the alert has an action button that opens the Hit reason modal (this was originally built and referred to internally as "Rule trigger" before being renamed for clarity).
The modal shows the full rule condition tree for the rule that triggered the alert, and next to each condition, the actual value from that specific transaction that was evaluated against it. This works for:
Simple field comparisons (e.g. transaction amount > threshold).
Arithmetic conditions (+, −, ×, ÷, %).
Entity and aggregate variables (e.g. "sum of transactions in the last 30 days"), shown with their resolved value at the time of the hit.
Conditions that compare one transaction field to another (shown as "Compared Tx value" / "Compared Agg value").
List-based conditions
When a rule condition references a list (for example, "country is in high-risk country list" or "similar to (lists)"), Hit reason also shows the specific list item that matched, so you don't have to go find it in the list yourself.
2. Hit reason for screening hits
Screening hits (sanctions, PEP, adverse media) work differently from rule hits, there's no condition tree, since a screening hit is a fuzzy name/entity match rather than a rule with thresholds. Instead, Flagright shows a Match % column on the screening results, giving the fuzziness/similarity score for each hit.
This makes it clear whether a hit is a strong or weak match, and whether the match was on the primary name or an associate's name, both of which affect how much attention a given hit deserves.
