Anti-Money Laundering Starts With the Address

Since 1 July 2026, many Australian real estate and professional services businesses have been required to meet new Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing requirements before certain property transactions proceed.

Customer due diligence can no longer sit in the background. Businesses need to know who their customer is and verify key information, including their residential address, using reliable and independent data.

For many teams, the real challenge is not collecting the address. It is getting that address to match cleanly against the source used to verify it.

When the address matches, onboarding keeps moving. When it does not, the customer may be pushed into manual review or asked to complete another verification step. That adds cost, slows the process and creates friction at the exact point they are trying to complete the transaction.

Addresses are not always entered, formatted or stored the same way across different systems. A small difference in spelling, unit structure or address format can make a valid address harder to match.

Normalising addresses against G-NAF, Australia’s Geocoded National Address File, gives verification a more consistent starting point. By aligning customer-provided addresses to a trusted national dataset, businesses can improve match rates, reduce manual handling and support a smoother onboarding process.