They aim to protect vulnerable customers and are reshaping how financial institutions handle privacy and competition rules.
Financial abuse now affects more than 2.4 million Australians and is estimated to drain close to $11 billion from the economy every year. It often sits alongside other forms of family violence, emotional manipulation and elder abuse. Until recently major financial institutions struggled to coordinate a response because competition rules made it difficult for banks, superannuation funds and insurers to sit in the same room and openly compare products, systems and frontline practices.
That barrier eased in December 2024 when the national competition regulator released guidance confirming that cross sector collaboration is allowed where it does not reduce competition and clearly delivers public benefit. A leading university has quickly moved to use this new clarity by launching a program that brings together super funds, banks, tax authorities, community legal centres and aged care groups. The program is starting with financial abuse as its pilot focus before turning to other big issues such as climate resilience and the future of work.
The emerging collaboration aims to do three things. It seeks to improve data sharing so institutions can see patterns of abuse across systems, share practical frontline techniques for spotting red flags and eventually redesign processes so abuse is harder to weaponise in the first place. Super funds already report cases where staff pick up on subtle behavioural cues, such as a relative trying to empty an older person’s $600,000 retirement account while speaking over them, that lead to specialist teams intervening and uncovering hidden problems like cognitive decline or coercion.
Banks have also been refining their systems after discovering that perpetrators were using tiny transfers, sometimes as small as 1 cent, to send threatening messages through payment reference fields. It is now common for institutions to automatically block transactions containing abusive language and to treat financial abuse as a valid reason to freeze or close accounts, which looks like an early example of how shared evidence can quickly turn into industry wide safeguards.
The broader aim is to break down silos so that evidence of how financial systems are misused can be pooled, tested and then built into standard practice across super funds, banks and government agencies. If the experiment works it could lead to stronger protections for older people and victims of domestic violence. It also raises questions about how far data sharing should go, how privacy is preserved and how institutions balance open collaboration with competitive tension.
