The Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA) launched the tool, which is powered by Kordamentha, at an event in Sydney on Wednesday afternoon.
SafeID is designed to help financial advisers comply with their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF), conducting immediate ID verification as well as politically exposed person (PEP) and sanctions checks.
“This is something that we haven’t done before, but we think it is really aligned with the interests of our members and it’s a way that we can really help them realise some efficiencies that as small businesspeople they’re really challenged to realise on their own,” said FAAA chief executive Sarah Abood.
She added: “The challenge for financial advice is because they’re small businesses, in many cases micro businesses, they have a really limited ability to realise efficiencies. Often, their licensee can help them, but not always.
“So, the fragmentation of the sector has actually meant that costs at an advisor level and at a client level have been going up. This is a problem that we focus on a lot in our advocacy, but this is another way that we can really help address that for members.”
Under upcoming reforms to AML/CTF obligations on 31 March 2026, obligations will extend to a broader group of reporting entities, including accountants, lawyers, real estate agents, property developers and financial advisers.
Last month, FAAA senior manager of policy Heather McEvoy said that for advisers, whether they need to follow the additional rules will depend on whether they provide Tranche 2 services.
“The reason why identifying services you provide is so critical is because there is actually quite a significant number of additional obligations that you’ll have to meet if you do provide an additional Tranche 2 service,” McEvoy explained on a webinar.
“This will be a business decision for advisers and licensees to determine whether to provide item 54 services and utilise the exemptions, or provide additional services to clients and comply with the full range of obligations.”
Importantly, Abood said on Wednesday, the FAAA SafeID tool will allow advisers to meet all of their AUSTRAC obligations – both the existing rules and the new legislation.
“The problem that we saw was that for many of our members, these processes were manual,” she said.
“They were literally getting clients coming in with driver’s licences, photocopying them, getting a JP to sign and authorise, scanning and then emailing that to product issues and other people in the value chain that have an obligation to identify clients.
“Two things struck us about that. One is that it’s incredibly inefficient, fundamentally unscalable. … but the other piece that’s become increasingly an issue is cyber security, because that email is actually one of the least secure elements in the digital security universe.”
Abood said that this was a “soft underbelly for financial advice practices”, and the FAAA wanted to help improve this for firms.
KordaMentha partner Alice Saveneh-Murray said that industry more broadly can benefit from “such a coordinated approach and actually get some relief from compliance pain points”.
“The solution that the FAAA SafeID provides really is going to take the complexity out of client identification for advisers, and it’s going to give confidence to the sector and to the product issuers at large that the compliance obligations are being met, not just now, but when those reforms come in next year,” Saveneh-Murray said.
“I can tell you from having worked with a lot of different sectors outside of the advice one, there are going to be lots of industries out there looking very enviously at what the FAAA has been able to do.”
The FAAA SafeID underlying technology providers are Vigilance AML, an experienced technology provider in the highly regulated AML/CTF compliance space, and FrankieOne, a RegTech company that provides a gateway into a global ecosystem of identity verification, KYC, and fraud prevention solutions. Providers are ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 type 2 compliant, and data is held on Australian servers.
