In September 2025, Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) CEO Brendan Thomas was interviewed by Kieran Beer, the Chief Analyst and Director of Editorial Content at the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) on the organisation’s official podcast, Financial Crime Matters.
In this wide-ranging interview, Thomas discussed how developments in technology were improving data analytics, AUSTRAC’s outreach efforts to newly regulated industries, and more. The interview can be listened to on Soundcloud as well as Spotify, with the latter dividing the interview up into seven sections:
- Co-Designing AML Rules with New Businesses
- Combatting Money Laundering and Organised Crime
- AUSTRAC’s Outreach for T2 Registration
- Handling Increased SMR with Technology
- Public-Private Partnerships for Real-Time Crime Fighting
- Safeguarding Data and Proving T2’s Worth
- T2’s Influence on Banks, VASPs, and Gambling
Helping tranche 2 entities
Thomas noted that many of the approximately 80,000 new tranche 2 (T2) entities that will now fall under the umbrella of Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) regime “know nothing about AML”, which has forced AUSTRAC to “think quite differently about how we go about our function”, particularly in terms of how it engages with and helps smaller and newly regulated entities.
To that end, Thomas said that AUSTRAC has actively engaged with many newly regulated industries and helped them co-design forms, risks assessments, and starter kits, among other things, working with them in a partnership, to ensure that their needs could be understood and met. Thomas explained that AUSTRAC is regularly talking to businesses to make it easy for them, and importantly, to understand how their reporting efforts help the Australian community combat money laundering and organised crime.
To further improve engagement and communications with newly regulated industries, Thomas said AUSTRAC created an industry engagement organisation aimed at understanding the mechanics of newly regulated businesses, hear their concerns, and obtain feedback on draft rules.
Combatting illicit flows entering Australia
During the interview, Thomas was candid about the criminal challenges Australia faces – including illicit tobacco, narcotics, fraud, and more, and said that Australia is “an attractive place to launder regional proceeds of crime”, noting in particular that illicit proceeds from Southeast Asia, Northern Asia, the South Pacific, and even within Australia itself, were being laundered into Australia’s housing market.
It is not all doom and gloom, however, with Thomas stating that AUSTRAC has had considerable success working with its law enforcement partners in recent years, and said that 65% of proceeds of crime seized were in Australian real estate properties. By bringing these unregulated markets that have historically been easier pathways for money laundering under the revised AML/CTF regime, Thomas said it will “help tackle the organised crime problem that we have here”.
Data and SMRs
For Thomas, the future of AML lies in the kind of work being undertaken by the Fintel Alliance and its efforts to fuse big data sets from financial institutions and “jointly interrogating those data sets”. Thomas said “that kind of big data fusion is really the future for us, and working closely in partnership with the private sector, both getting intelligence and also their skills around the table to work on that”.
Where data capture is concerned, numerous conversations have been had with large financial institutions to review the reporting process, to reduce the number of false positives, and use the large volumes of data they supply in more meaningful ways.
And though AUSTRAC expects an increase in suspicious matter reports (SMRs) from smaller, newly regulated businesses, it knows it won’t be on the same scale as larger existing reporting entities (such as banks), but it does have some expectations around initial reporting outcomes, and will be using artificial intelligence to interpret and analyse data more effectively, whilst also improving public-private partnerships, to, as Thomas said, “merge that data across industry types and get better pictures of risk than we’ve been able to get in the past”.
Privacy safeguards and data processing
In response to a question from Beer about private/personal information safeguards, Thomas explained it was one of his biggest concerns, and one that AUSTRAC has sought to manage carefully by having strong statutory legal safeguards active as well as through a team whose job is to constantly audit AUSTRAC’s data and how it’s used.
Thomas said that performance measures had also been put in place to measure how data is used by law enforcement partners, what it’s used for, and the results of that use. AUSTRAC is also taking steps to show businesses how it’s using the data they supply.
Gambling and digital assets
In addition to both previous and pending actions that have been taken against casinos due to organised crime infiltrating them to launder money, Thomas noted that for digital assets in Australia “the only real regulatory requirements they’ve had is AML regulation, so they haven’t fallen under financial services regulation”.
Thomas said he hoped that would change in the future, and noted that the Australian government had issued some draft legislation that, if passed, would bring digital assets under financial services regulation, and thus “drive some of the bad actors that we’ve seen in our businesses out”.
Key takeaways
In his conversation with ACAMS’ Kieran Beer, AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas laid out the strategy that Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulator would be taking with both new and existing reporting entities, explained how AUSTRAC is working to help newly regulated entities understand and implement their compliance and reporting obligations, and revealed how advances in technology and data analytics are helping authorities uncover and put a stop to illicit crime activities in Australia.
