Financial crime fighting the next big thing, but who’s going to play detective?

Wanted: “skilled anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism funding professional”.

Expect to see many such job ads in the near future to plug a skills gap that Australia is struggling to fill – people trained in tracking down white-collar criminals and laundered money.

Alice Saveneh-Murray and Swinburne student Julia Urban preparing to fight financial crime.Credit: Simon Schluter

Australian companies that don’t know their AMLs (anti-money-laundering) from their CTFs (counter-terrorism-financing) face a rude shock as new federal government regulations, due as early as next month, will require them to comply with a raft of new financial crime measures.

Workers qualified to do the job are already in short supply. But several Australian universities are beginning to step in to remedy that shortfall.

Swinburne University’s new “financial crime lab”, which launched on Friday at its Hawthorn campus, is designed to help fill the skills gap and to attract students looking to get a foot in the door of the growing sector.

The lab will be run in partnership with KordaMentha, the firm best known for its high-profile insolvency work, but which is increasingly involved in cybersecurity and forensic accounting services, with the university spruiking the private-sector partnership as a “pioneering industry-university collaboration”.

KordaMentha partner Alice Saveneh-Murray says demand for “skilled anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism funding professional” will soar in coming years.

“We’re going to go from somewhere like 15,000 to over 100,000 reporting entities that will be required to employ a compliance officer, draft policies and procedures and do risk assessments and all of these things,” Saveneh-Murray said.

“It’s going to be really hard for them to find people in that market and it’s going to cost them a lot of money, unless we can find innovative ways of attracting people into this market.”

Swinburne is increasingly marketing itself as a provider of job-ready education, as local tertiary institutions look to bolster enrolments hit by the federal government’s cuts to visa numbers for overseas students.

But the program is not unique; Queensland’s Griffith University launched its Academy of Excellence in Financial Crime Investigation in partnership with the Commonwealth Bank last year, and Charles Sturt university, which has campuses in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, offers a graduate diploma in fraud and financial crime.

Swinburne says its new training ground offers students “a fast-tracked pathway into the workforce”, according to senior university executive Nicki Wragg, and it will provide a steady flow of recruits to KordaMentha’s growing cyber practice.

Professor Chris Ziguras, from Melbourne University’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, said Swinburne was playing to its strengths with the crime lab initiative.

“This is a natural thing for Swinburne to be doing; identifying niche programs in emerging areas of demand that differentiate it from bigger and more generalist universities,” Ziguras said.

“The tie-up with an industry partner to design a program is a good idea to ensure the currency and relevance of academic programs, and again, it’s something that Swinburne is probably more agile and able to do those sorts of things compared with bigger universities.”

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.