A newly formed group of businesses and organizations in Australia are set to team up to fight financial abuse as part of a new program that encourages collaboration to address major social and economic ills, the Australian Financial Review reported.

The initiative is being convened through a University of New South Wales program, Progress Partners, AFR said. The university estimates that financial abuse—a type of family or domestic violence that can occur alongside emotional abuse, physical violence, or elder abuse—costs the Australian economy nearly A$11 billion annually and affects more than 2.4 million Australians. 

Addressing the problem necessitates industry collaboration, UNSW vice president of societal impact, equity, and engagement Verity Firth told the news outlet. Yet banks, super funds, and insurers were restrained from working together under the law until the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission issued formal guidelines in December 2024 on how businesses can work together to deliver a public benefit without impinging on competition.

The inaugural plan has drawn interest from Aware Super, CareSuper, the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, AMP, Commonwealth Bank, Kingsford Legal Centre, the Australian Taxation Office, HESTA, UniSuper, several community legal centers and aged care organizations, AFR reported. 

The program participants can help to accomplish three goals, according to Aware Super chief Deanne Stewart: build data-sharing capacity to better understand the scope and nature of financial abuse, develop best practices to fight the problem, and deploy preventative measures, including by alerting other firms and organizations of related red flags and typologies. 

One red flag cited in the AFR report are 1-cent transactions. Commonwealth Bank discovered in 2019 that abusers were weaponizing such small transactions by using payment reference fields to write abusive messages to their victims, the news outlet said. 

Today, it is a common practice of banks to flag and even block such transactions and cite financial abuse as the reason for the suspension or account termination, AFR said. 

“That’s a great example where people are now receiving warnings or being de-banked … I think that is a tremendous initiative,” Jan Breckenridge, the co-convener of the UNSW Gendered Violence Research Network, said in the report. 

Read more at the Australian Financial Review