Peter Forwood
Partner, MinterEllison Consulting, Sydney
I help clients navigate financial crime risks and obligations, including money laundering/terrorism financing, sanctions, fraud, dishonesty, bribery, and market abuse. I focus on regulatory issues, potential or actual enforcement actions, enforceable undertakings, breach notices, and litigation.

With over 18 years' specialist experience in financial crime and forensics at a Big 4 global consulting firm, including as the Australian Financial Crime Leader, my focus is on the financial services industry.

Career highlights

  • Conducted extensive root cause analysis for a Big 4 bank's systemic know your customer (KYC) issues, providing recommendations and an implementation plan that fundamentally re-designed its onboarding operating model by introducing specialist teams and workflow.
  • Provided multi-year litigation support and operational uplift for an Australian bookmaker. This work included working under instruction with lawyers to assist with the provision of legal advice, thematic advisory reviews into areas of high-risk (such as transaction monitoring (TM)), operational support for enhanced customer due diligence (ECDD), and assurance reviews.
  • Led a multi-year transformation of a Big 4 bank’s financial crime operating model. This involved leading a team of over 200 financial crime professionals across both risk and operational functions in a full-scale re-build and uplift of the financial crime life cycle at the bank (including policy, advisory, assurance, onboarding, risk assessments, KYC, customer due diligence, ECDD, TM, and exits). This was conducted under intense regulatory, board, and c-suite focus.
  • Conducted a detailed compliance assessment and benchmarking of a Big 4 bank’s financial crime operations against best practice, local peer, and comparative international organisations. This work included engagement with heads of businesses, executives of the bank, and the board, as well as detailed walkthroughs and file testing of key areas of risk for the bank.
  • Worked with internal and external counsel, provided regulatory response support for a multi-national financial services company (asset servicing, wealth management, and investment management) facing intense regulatory scrutiny by AUSTRAC. This engagement included assisting with policy, conducting file testing, reporting to the global board, and drafting formal regulatory responses.
  • Conducted numerous Independent Reviews (as required by the AML/CTF regulations) for a wide variety of organisations (20 to 30 a year) in financial services and other sectors. This included performing an Independent Review for an Australian bookmaker that was later subject to an Enforceable Undertaking which included an expert reviewing in detail the Independent Review I had conducted.
  • Conducted numerous ML/TF risk assessments for Australian institutions. Including enterprise-wide risk assessments (EWRAs), product risk assessments (PRAs), customer risk assessments (CRAs), and channel risk assessments (ChRAs). These engagements have included developing tailored methodologies for risk assessments, executing risk assessments, control assessments to support the risk assessments, and subsequent uplift programs.

Our consulting services are provided (directly and indirectly) by MinterEllison Consulting (ABN 50 017 469 292) and MinterEllison Consulting Pty Ltd (ABN 50 077 613 828), both of which are part of the MinterEllison Group. Our consulting services do not constitute legal services nor legal advice and are not provided by Australian legal practitioners acting in that capacity. The laws and regulations which govern the provision of legal services in the relevant jurisdiction do not apply to the provision of non-legal services.