Imagine tipping out a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle onto a table.
At first, progress comes quickly. You find the corner pieces. You connect a stretch of coastline. A patch of blue sky begins to take shape. Before long, you can see the picture coming together across the table.
But eventually, you hit a wall.
“Individual banks only ever see part of the picture. It’s not until we bring that data together that we can identify who the perpetrators are, how much money they’re moving and where that money is going.”
You know there's a boat somewhere in there. But crucial pieces are missing. No matter how patient or determined you are, you can't complete the picture because you don't have all the information in front of you.
Fighting financial crime presents a similar challenge.
And ANZ’s Head of Financial Crime, Milan Gigovic, knows this better than most.
“Individual banks only ever see part of the picture,” Gigovic says. “It’s not until we bring that data together that we can identify who the perpetrators are, how much money they’re moving and where that money is going.”
Fighting organised crime in the Pacific
Drawing on lessons learned through Australia's pioneering public-private partnership model, the Fintel Alliance, ANZ is helping drive a new approach to fighting organised crime in the Pacific.
Together with AUSTRAC, Fiji's Financial Intelligence Unit, Fiji Police and five Fiji-based banks, ANZ is playing a leading role in piloting the establishment of a Pacific Public-Private Partnership (PPP) a collaboration designed to strengthen the region's ability to combat transnational crime and national security matters. The initiative applies proven approaches from Australia's Fintel Alliance while tailoring them to the unique risks and operating environment of Pacific nations.
For Milan Gigovic, the value of collaboration is well established.
"We were very proactive in the early days of Australia's public-private partnership model, sharing intelligence-led dynamic algorithms and driving projects targeting child exploitation, professional money laundering, family and domestic violence, illegal wildlife trafficking, and fraud against the National Disability Insurance Scheme," he says.
"What we learnt very quickly was that bringing banks, AUSTRAC and law enforcement together enabled us to better understand criminal threats and identify risks that would have been difficult to detect in isolation. That insight helped strengthen our controls and improve our ability to detect and disrupt risks that we weren’t previously finding."
"That approach has delivered tangible outcomes. We saw significant outcomes on the back of that work, including arrests, prosecutions and the confiscation of criminal assets,” Gigovic says.
CEO of AUSTRAC and Pacific Financial Intelligence Community (PFIC) co-chair Brendan Thomas said this type of public-private partnership with major financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and academia is a world first.
“This is building on years of cooperation among financial intelligence units across the Pacific,” Mr Thomas said.
“This kind of cooperation between banks and financial intelligence agencies will make the whole region safer and step up our fight against organised crime.” A Pacific PPP would seek to replicate that success in Fiji and, eventually, across the broader Pacific region. Strong interest has already emerged from other Pacific jurisdictions, although the initial focus remains on demonstrating success in Fiji before expanding further.
Why Fiji?
Fiji was selected as the first operational market because of the growing challenge posed by transnational organised crime and illicit drug trafficking in the region.
Historically viewed as a transit point for drugs destined for larger markets such as Australia and New Zealand, Fiji has increasingly found itself confronting the impacts of organised criminal networks closer to home.
Large drug seizures in recent years have highlighted the scale and sophistication of these networks and the need for a coordinated response across government, law enforcement and the financial sector.
Between January and May this year, an astonishing 17,000 kilograms of illicit drugs were intercepted.
How it works
The Pacific PPP is currently focused on two key projects.
The first is a collaborative analytics project based on the Fintel Alliance Collaborative Analytics Hub, a pioneering initiative developed in Australia with ANZ playing a key role in its design and establishment. By combining data from participating banks, the initiative can identify risks, patterns and connections that individual institutions may not detect working in isolation. These insights can then be shared with law enforcement, helping authorities target the individuals, networks and facilitators behind criminal activity.
The second initiative focuses on protecting Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) Scheme workers from organised crime groups. Intelligence gathered in Australia suggests some workers are being pressured to sell or hand over access to their bank accounts, which can then be used to move criminal proceeds.
Through intelligence sharing between banks and law enforcement agencies in Australia and the Pacific, the Alliance is helping identify those responsible while also educating workers about the risks and warning signs.
Delivering results
For Gigovic, the success of a Pacific PPP will ultimately be measured by the impact it has on communities.
"For me, it's about demonstrating what’s possible when industry, financial intelligence units and law enforcement work side by side, building trust, sharing intelligence and tackling threats together," he says. "It's about understanding risks, deploying the right intel-led controls and generating actionable intelligence that helps disrupt criminal activity and protect communities.”
The Pacific initiative was further reinforced at the inaugural Pacific Transnational Organised Crime Summit earlier this year, attended by more than 20 Pacific police commissioners, international law enforcement representatives and regional leaders. The summit focused on the growing challenges posed by illicit drugs and transnational organised crime across the region.
While the challenge is significant, Gigovic says partnerships like the Pacific PPP can help make organised crime networks think twice.
"What we can do is make it clear to organised crime that we're watching and that we will do everything in our power to identify who is generating those profits from illicit activity and who's trying to move money in and out of the Pacific," he says.
“That’s where our expertise lies, and we have a strong track record of delivering results through intelligence-sharing and collaboration.”
As the Pacific PPP continues to evolve, ANZ’s involvement highlights how banks can contribute beyond traditional financial services by combining intelligence, technology and partnerships to help protect communities and strengthen the resilience of the Pacific financial system.
"Public-private partnerships are no longer optional, they are essential in the fight against financial crime and the harm it causes,” Gigovic says. “Criminal networks operate across institutions, industries and borders, and effective disruption requires the same level of collaboration.”
Alicia Muling is Senior Journalist at ANZ.