What's your job about?
I work in Financial Crime Operations, so as you can gather from the name stopping Financial Crime! We do a lot of very different work in this space but to keep it simple. We investigate transaction monitoring alerts flagged by our systems or any unusual activity reports from the entire NAB group. We try to determine if the activity is in line with various criminal typologies i.e. (narcotics offences, money laundering). If we find enough evidence to form suspicion we collate it and submit a Suspicious Matter Report which we send to our regulator AUSTRAC. From there it is hopefully used to assist law enforcement in their investigations.
In my role I have worked on projects where we have trialled new data analytics software, I have had training/presentations from various organisations like the Australian Federal Police and The Australian Tax Office who provide guidance and some insights into how we can better capture actionable intelligence for them to use.
Unfortunately, a lot of the most interesting details are confidential! I guess that is what makes it interesting in the first place.
What's your background?
I grew up in Nanango in Queensland. A very rural town where not much exciting happened, unfortunately.
Once I finished high school I moved to Brisbane and started working/studying, I went through a LOT of different industries before settling on an Accounting and Finance degree.
During my studies, I worked as a Summer intern and was lucky enough to receive a graduate offer in an Audit role. However, that wasn’t due to start til January next year. As I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait, I saw a role for a KYC Analyst (Know your customer) position at a big 4 Bank and applied. I worked there for about 6 months before I was transferred into the Transaction Monitoring Team, once I started working here I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed the work so I ended up not taking the offer for the graduate position. A year or so later and I was lucky enough to be promoted into a Senior position within the Complex Investigations team.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes, we have people from all kinds of backgrounds in our team, the more diverse your life/work experience the better as it allows the team to draw on any expertise you may have in different industries to understand if an activity is unusual or not.
What's really important though is that you have a love for learning, in my job we are constantly trying to improve, do things better, be predictive rather than reactive. So naturally, things progress very quickly so you need to love learning/relearning and just moving with the times.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The coolest thing about my job is knowing that there is a chance you may assist police in apprehending a criminal. We investigate all kinds of criminal activity you probably wouldn’t expect, commonly known examples would be Fraud/Money Laundering to more uncomfortable topics like Human Exploitation. So for me, the coolest thing is just knowing our work has a positive impact on our community.
What are the limitations of your job?
Firstly there is a lot of confidentiality involved, so for privacy/legal reasons, it's hard to discuss what you do on a day to day basis. Sometimes I have super interesting things happen at work but I can only share them with my colleagues. So it does make those around the table work conversations harder to navigate, sometimes you feel like you have nothing you can share.
Also sometimes you will come across cases whether its through adverse media or otherwise of particularly difficult to read crimes.
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