Fighting financial crime every day
We know that our customers are increasingly being impacted by incidences of financial crime. This includes anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing, scams and fraud, anti-bribery, corruption and sanctions.
We invest in appropriate systems, processes and knowledge to enable identification and resolution of risks and incidents and to minimise their negative impacts. As a Bank, we manage risk every day. We understand that financial crime presents a risk to our day-to-day operations, as well as the welfare of our people, customers and communities. Our stakeholders have placed their trust in us, and it is important that we uphold this by detecting, preventing and minimising risk to them. To do this, we take a risk-based approach to assessing potential criminal behaviour. By applying a variety of controls, training our people and upgrading technology and processes, we can keep our organisation safe, which in turn means a safer financial system and community.
Taking action against financial crime
We understand that financial crime remains a key concern for our customers and communities. It undermines prosperity, trust and wellbeing. The threat of financial crime is not unique to our Bank and is seen as an increasing challenge across the banking industry and wider economy. We manage and monitor the areas of money laundering, terrorism financing, sanctions, bribery and corruption, and scams and fraud. We are a member of the Fintel Alliance, a public - private collaboration between banks, law enforcement and AUSTRAC to share information and complete joint investigations into areas of concern.
We fight financial crime by continually looking for ways to improve and uplift our policies, processes, systems and capability across the Bank, including fraud detection tools, monitoring and investigative techniques.
Protecting against fraud and scams
We continue to innovate and improve protections against online fraud for our customers and the Bank. One of the ways we are doing this is through behavioural biometrics technology. This helps us proactively detect and prevent the unauthorised use of customer accounts and reduce customer and Bank losses.
While we have implemented technical measures and uplifted our people’s knowledge and capabilities to address this, it is equally important that our customers treat their personal information and security credentials seriously. We all have a role to play in protecting against fraudulent behaviour. To help our customers protect themselves, we keep them updated on the latest scams and have developed publicly available resources. We are also a part of the industry-wide Fraud Reporting Exchange (FRX). FRX facilitates the quick reporting of fraudulent payments en route or transferred to another bank, which will disrupt fraudsters and scammers by allowing the reporting of scam payments in close to real time, boosting the likelihood that funds can be frozen and returned to customers.
Engaging ethically
We are continually strengthening our financial crime practices, processes and systems to keep abreast of the increasing threat landscape. There has also been significant change across industry with regulatory reform in the anti-bribery and corruption, anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing areas, including the recent establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC). We have updated key policies to reflect changing compliance requirements.
