Australia’s Commonwealth Bank (CBA) is launching a police referral pilot designed to set new standards for how banks report tech-facilitated abuse to law enforcement.

The bank is building on on its existing use of AI to identify and stop abuse in transaction descriptions by working with police in New South Wales (NSW) to create a new process that will allow it to report abuse with the consent of victims.

CBA first rolled out abuse transaction monitoring in 2020, with 400,000 transactions blocked annually by an automatic filer that prevents offensive language being used in transaction descriptions on its app.

The technology is augmented by an AI model that reviews transactions, detecting around 1,500 perpetrators sending potentially abusive messages annually.

These cases are manually reviewed to determine the severity of the messages and identify the appropriate action required by the bank.

As part of the new pilot, if CBA identifies a NSW-based customer is receiving repeated abuse in transaction descriptions, they will be contacted to ask if they would like the bank to report the abuse on their behalf to NSW Police.

If the customer consents to this, CBA will initiate a report to the NSW police.

Victims can also contact CBA and ask it to report these instances of abuse on their behalf.

“The launch of this new pilot with NSW Police will help provide better support for customers experiencing abuse," said Angela Macmillan, CBA group customer advocate. “Technology-facilitated abuse continues to be a serious problem, and this collaboration with NSW Police enables us to act – not only in supporting victims, but in the prevention of abuse."

She added: "This is a first of its kind initiative between the banking industry and law enforcement, and we hope this paves the way for more effective collaboration in the fight against domestic and financial abuse.”

The new pilot is expected to launch officially by mid-September.

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