NAB has been flagging around 10 transactions a month as potentially related to human trafficking but did not maintain its own records of its suspicions about the sinister nature of transactions involving criminals, terrorists and paedophiles until the middle of 2019.

The bank revealed over the seven months to January 2020 that it identified as many as 68 transactions as exhibiting characteristics consistent with human trafficking and another 148 with child exploitation before reporting them to the financial intelligence regulator AUSTRAC.