Cash Is King in Your Business — Which Is Exactly Why AUSTRAC Is Watching | AML/CTF DPMS Australia 2026

Every precious-metals business knows cash is part of the trade. What fewer owners have absorbed since the Tranche 2 reforms commenced on 1 July 2026 is that the same cash intensity that makes the business work also makes it a standing priority for AUSTRAC enforcement.

Why DPMS is a high-priority sector

Money launderers love what jewellers and bullion dealers handle: portable, high-value goods that hold value, convert easily back to cash, and don't ask questions. Add anonymous or walk-in buyers and a culture of cash settlement, and you have a classic vehicle for cleaning illicit funds — including through trade-based money laundering, where the goods themselves move value across a chain of transactions.

That's not a slur on the industry. It's precisely why the regime captured DPMS (s 6(3), Table 2 of the AML/CTF Act), and why regulators expect this sector to take monitoring seriously rather than treat it as paperwork.

The reports you owe

Two obligations matter most day to day:

• Threshold Transaction Reports (TTRs): transactions involving $10,000 or more in physical currency must be reported to AUSTRAC under section 43 of the Act within 10 business days. For DPMS, this is the same cash line that makes the transaction a designated service — so your "regulated" deals and your "reportable" deals largely coincide.
• Suspicious Matter Reports (SMRs): anything that gives you reasonable grounds to suspect money laundering, terrorism financing or other serious crime must be reported under section 41 — regardless of dollar value, and even if the deal never completes. SMRs are generally due within 3 business days of forming the suspicion (24 hours where it relates to terrorism financing).

The red flag most staff miss: structuring

The pattern that trips up cash businesses is structuring (also called smurfing): deliberately breaking one large transaction into several smaller ones to stay under the $10,000 threshold. Deliberately conducting transactions to avoid the reporting requirements is itself an offence under section 142 of the Act — and, as AUSTRAC stresses, "linked or apparently linked" transactions are counted together toward the threshold anyway.

The problem is obvious in hindsight and almost invisible in real time — because the suspicious part is the pattern across transactions, not any single sale. You can't expect a counter assistant to be a financial-crime analyst tracking who bought what last Tuesday.

Let the system do the analysis

This is the core job of Veriqua's Transaction Monitoring module with AI Triage. Instead of relying on staff to remember and connect cash transactions across days and customers, Veriqua automatically flags structuring and smurfing patterns for review. The AI Triage layer surfaces the transactions that actually warrant a closer look and quietens the noise — so your team escalates the right ones and gets on with serving customers.

In other words: your staff don't have to become money-laundering experts. The platform watches the pattern, flags the anomaly, and gives you a defensible, timestamped record that you were monitoring — which is exactly what AUSTRAC expects to see.

See the monitoring in action in two minutes, no login: demo.veriqua.com.au/start.