17 February 2025
RUSI (2025) ¦ The Role of Financial Institutions in Tackling Human Trafficking
From early awareness to data-driven disruption — lessons from two decades of Stop the Traffik and the evolving partnership with banks and agencies
Ruth Dearnley of Stop the Traffik and John Cusack of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime reviewed how financial institutions can move from compliance exercises to measurable impact in tackling human trafficking. Their discussion traced the sector’s journey from limited awareness to operational intelligence partnerships, and set out what’s still needed to scale effective disruption.
From a calling to a movement
Ruth recounted how Stop the Traffik began around 2005 from a single conversation and a determination to act. Early on, the issue of trafficking barely registered in many sectors. Ruth, a former teacher, found herself immersed in frontline work: traveling, building relationships with first responders and survivors, and learning that countless people and organisations were exhausted, treating symptoms rather than preventing harm. The charity’s name set a clear aim — to stop trafficking — but achieving that required more than rescue work; it demanded systems that prevent exploitation and break the financial networks that enable it.
Why financial footprints matter
Very early, Ruth saw that trafficking produced a financial footprint that could be turned into actionable intelligence. Survivors and front-line NGOs often hold rich transactional and contextual clues — phone numbers, payment routes, IP addresses, names of controllers — that could help connect criminals to financial flows. However, those clues lived in silos: NGOs, law enforcement, border agencies and banks operated with different incentives, data architectures and legal constraints. Even when NGOs had detailed information, privacy and data-sharing rules often forced them to strip out precise identifiers, leaving only generic signals that were hard to act upon in a financial investigation.
The turning point: 2012–2015
The early 2010s brought momentum. Major policy instruments (such as the UK’s Modern Slavery Act and Section 54 on supply chains) raised visibility and created pressure to do more than tick boxes. Ruth and allies like Neil Giles — who moved from a law enforcement background to work with NGO-held data — recognized that no single actor had the full picture. The idea emerged that if NGO data could be safely and intelligently shared with banks and investigators, the ecosystem could generate much stronger, targeted intelligence.
Building trusted information-sharing pathways
Stop the Traffik helped pioneer initiatives to pool and standardize survivor and incident data into a dataset that could be analyzed and matched to financial records. This required trust-building across very different cultures: NGOs focused on care and confidentiality; banks on compliance and transaction monitoring; law enforcement on evidence and operational priorities. Progress included creating intelligence products, using federated architectures that protect sensitive information, and assembling datasets spanning hundreds of NGOs. By 2025, partnerships matured further: vetted bank personnel gaining access to operational law enforcement channels, and joint operational work that had been envisioned a decade earlier starting to produce arrests and disruption.
From downstream rescue to upstream prevention
A persistent challenge Ruth highlighted is allocation of resources: many actors remained concentrated on downstream responses — hotlines and post-exploitation support — because funding models and organizational incentives reinforced that focus. Prevention, intelligence sharing and financial disruption require sustained investment and different metrics: measuring arrests alone isn’t enough; success must be assessed by the reduction of harms, interrupted criminal networks and prevented exploitations.
Concrete examples of impact
Ruth described cases where an exploited person in Myanmar or elsewhere contacted NGOs, provided identifiers (telephone numbers, IPs, transactional details), and through patient engagement over weeks or months this information was analyzed and mapped. The resultant intelligence flowed to banks and Interpol, leading to arrests and disruptions of payment networks. While feedback is often limited for operational and legal reasons, these outcomes demonstrate that intelligence derived from survivor testimony and NGO casework can create effective financial disruption when shared appropriately.
Where the gaps remain
Despite progress, gaps persist. Legal and regulatory frameworks in many jurisdictions restrict how NGOs can share data with financial institutions and law enforcement. Trust between sectors can still be fragile; competition for funding and differing incentives limit sharing. Technical challenges remain in matching heterogeneous NGO data with bank datasets without exposing survivors or compromising investigations. Finally, scaling these pilots into routine, global practice requires consistent governance, funding and operational protocols.
What needs to happen next Ruth and John stressed several priorities to move from pilots to scale:
- Create legal-safe, privacy-preserving information-sharing mechanisms that allow NGOs to provide precise, actionable indicators without compromising survivor safety.
- Invest in federated technical architectures and standardized intelligence products so banks and law enforcement can use NGO-derived signals at scale.
- Expand vetted liaison roles across banks and law enforcement, enabling faster operational follow-up on credible intelligence.
- Rebalance funding and performance metrics toward prevention and measurable disruption, not only downstream assistance.
- Build more inclusive roundtable forums where NGOs, banks, tech providers, law enforcement and survivors’ representatives meet regularly to co-design operational responses and learn from joint activity.
Conclusion
The trajectory since 2015 shows the concept works: when survivor and NGO data are trusted, structured and shared responsibly, banks can turn that intelligence into concrete disruption of trafficking networks. The next phase must be about scaling those approaches, strengthening legal and technical bridges, and reorienting incentives so financial institutions measure and pursue harm reduction, not just compliance. The emerging operational partnerships between banks, investigators and NGOs demonstrate real potential — the challenge now is to make them widespread, routine and survivor-centred so that prevention becomes as prominent as rescue.