Safety by Design

Designing for safety: Learning from those leading the way
The inaugural Safety by Design Conference brings together regulators, industry leaders, and early adopters to answer a practical question: how do we actually embed customer safety in systems from the very beginning?
Over two days, we’ll move past the theory to focus on tangible implementation. Critically, we will look at how others in your industry are already forging a pathway, ensuring that safety and privacy gaps no longer leave victim-survivors exposed to avoidable harm.
Crucially, the conference explores how these risks are being systematically removed through real-world application. Presenters will share their first-mover insights, showing you how to navigate regulation and adopt the proven approaches that are working right now.
Safety by Design is a call to action for leaders ready to learn from the frontrunners – recognising that proactive prevention is the most effective way to fulfill our shared responsibility to keep people safe.
Benefits of attending
Learn how to engineer safety into systems before harm occurs
Apply common misuse-journey mapping scenarios to uncover hidden system risks
Shift responsibility from customers to safer product design
Embed lived expertise into policy, design and decision-making
Stay ahead of emerging safety, trust and regulatory expectations
Speakers
Tiffiny Lewin
Head of Vulnerability & Inclusion, Customer Solutions & Customer and Corporate Services
Westpac
Cameron Geason
General Manager – Retail Operations, Origin Energy
Chair, One Generation Business Initiative
Safety by design is a way of seeing risk differently. It challenges businesses to ask one deceptively simple question: Are our products safe for customers in unsafe situations?
From there, everything changes. It means reimagining product features because safety shouldn’t depend on luck, courage or who speaks up first. It should be designed in.
This conference is a timely and essential platform for businesses to learn how to engineer safety into systems, services and culture before harm occurs.”
Catherine Fitzpatrick, Founder, Flequity Ventures
Your event experience
Engage in two days of deep, practical learning — not surface-level discussion
Benefit from the insight and lessons of lived expertise
Explore how 25 cross-industry voices from regulators, banks, telcos, insurers and tech are embedding change to improve safety outcomes
Learn from others in focused Interactive roundtables focused on real-world system redesign
Embrace candid, senior-level conversations grounded in real implementation
Who should attend:
Senior leaders, customer advocates, policymakers and practitioners responsible for designing, governing or delivering customer-facing systems across government and regulated industries, including financial services, insurance, utilities, telecommunications, technology, legal, and property.
This includes:
- Senior executives and strategic leaders
- Customer advocates and social impact leads
- Heads of customer vulnerability, risk, and compliance
- Specialist family and domestic violence teams
- CX, UX and product designers
- Legal and governance professionals
- Regulators and policy leaders
- Frontline service and operations managers
Agenda
All times shown in AEST
Welcome to Country & Opening remarks from the MC
Designed to disrupt: Smarter products, safer futures
- Abusers exploit systems – thinking like a perpetrator to keep women safe
- Understand the tactics of abusers and how their tactics parallel scams and fraud
- Common misuse scenarios relevant to every sector
- Safety by default: Making safety a core requirement for every product, not an optional extra

Catherine Fitzpatrick
CEO & Founder
Flequity Ventures
Internal audit and red flag mapping
Instead of starting from a blank page, tables will review a Safety Ledger – a curated list of real-world harm patterns identified by early adopters and experts in your sector.
- The Task: Identify which of these established “risk patterns” exist within your current product ecosystem.
- The Goal: Stop “rediscovering the wheel” and start identifying known vulnerabilities in your user journeys.
Morning Tea
Learning from lived experience: How to use lived expertise to reduce harm
A group of lived-experience experts will discuss and share the experiences and impacts of perpetrators who manipulate systems.
- Understanding how perpetrators misuse and abuse via systems and platforms
- Exploring what lived experience survivors need from products, services, and platforms to feel safety and trust
- Curating the impacts at a personal, emotional, psychological, and familial level
- Inconsistencies in customer service and experience that perpetuate harm and undermine safety
This session will include lived expertise of systems abuse.
CHAIR
Karen Bevan
CEO
Full Stop Australia
Mapping common misuse scenarios to your organisation
In this interactive roundtable session, participants will be guided through a scenario-based design activity.
Lunch
How we ignited business solutions at scale for customers
- Solving real-world problems and coming together to collaborate
- Providing access to comprehensive, wrap-around support from multiple service providers
- Implementing training and providing extra support where and when it’s needed
CHAIR
Ciara Sterling
Chief Executive Officer
Thriving Communities Australia

Cameron Geason
General Manager – Retail Operations, Origin Energy
Chair, One Generation Business Initiative

Melissa Foss
Manager Customer Advocacy
Suncorp

Lisa Anelli
General Manager - Retail Services
Yarra Valley Water
Innovating for safety: Strengthening financial safety for customers
- Strengthening protections for customers at risk of financial abuse and experiencing vulnerability
- Recognising red flags and taking appropriate action: When the use of products and services is inappropriate
- Changing terms and conditions to make it clear that a bank account is no place for abuse

Michelle Gibbon
AMP Customer Advocate
AMP Bank
Afternoon Tea
Safety as the new standard: Moving from guidance to governance
- Beyond ‘disclosure’: Enforcing proactive protection frameworks
- How regulators can mandate ‘safe address’ protocols while ensuring data integrity
- Scaling from voluntary pilot programs to enforceable mandatory standards
- Establishing the compliance benchmarks for a safety-first market
- Operationalising capability and the shifting remit of the regulator

Dr Hannah Tonkin
NSW Women's Safety Commissioner
Department of Communities & Justice NSW

Gerard Brody
Chairperson
Essential Services Commission (ESC) Victoria

Carol Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
ACCAN

Micaela Cronin
Inaugural Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner
Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission
Weaponising insurance: Redesigning products to protect victim-survivors
- Adopting a ‘conduct of others’ clause and how this impacts victim-survivors
- Engaging with sensitivity, dignity, respect, and compassion
- Minimising the number of times that customers need to tell us that they have been affected by family violence
- Ensuring claims handling processes are considerate and sensitive

Annabelle Butler
Customer Advocate
Hollard Insurance Australia
Closing remarks
Acknowledgement of Country & opening remarks
CHAIR
Yasmin London
Chief Executive Officer & Founder
First Movers Co
Understanding context to prevent domestic abuse & harms
- Designing for dignity and safety with safety as the default
- Recognising coercive control and unhealthy masculinity not as isolated events
- Overcoming cognitive dissonance: your teams will be manipulated and charmed
- Ensuring that violence cannot thrive

Dave Kramer
Behavioural Scientist & Ambassador
Small Steps 4 Hannah
Reimagining design for safety
- Designing for safety, inclusion, and access, and taking that theory into practice
- Demystifying the operational challenges
- Understanding harm deeply and embedding lived experience into your thinking
- Building momentum and creating blueprints for use cases internally

David Ranasinghe
Executive Director, Customer Services - Fines & Debt
Revenue NSW

Janine Rayner
Head of Social Impact and Engagement
Uniting Vic. Tas

Malini Raj
Executive Director
Australian Multicultural Women's Alliance

Christy Ditchburn
Sustainability Principal
Telstra Corporation
Morning tea
Designing for safety, access & inclusion
This discussion will focus on how inclusion and accessibility are central to designing safer systems.
- How systemic design can reinforce or mitigate risks of harm for women seeking help or navigating services
- What inclusive design looks like in practice
- Shaping prevention strategies that truly reach and protect all women
- Removing the onus on women

Tiffiny Lewin
Head of Vulnerability & Inclusion, Customer Solutions & Customer and Corporate Services
Westpac

Yumi Lee
CEO
Older Women's Network NSW Inc

Sono Weatherall
Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Strong Women Talking
Equipping teams for the front line: Navigating manipulation and driving change
This panel brings together leading practitioners, educators, and researchers to provide practical strategies for staff managing the complex dynamics of harm.
Drawing on frontline practice, prevention education, and gendered violence research, the discussion will provide tools to help teams identify how men justify, minimise, and sustain abuse. Crucially, experts will share proven approaches for staff to maintain professional boundaries and safety when perpetrators attempt to manipulate the narrative or derail support for women.

Tony Johannsen
Executive Manager of Clinical Practice and Quality
Family Life

Ben Vasiliou
Chief Executive Officer
The Man Cave

Dean Cooper
DFV Educator and Consultant
Cooper Consultancy
Balancing the nuances in customer service & experience
In this interactive roundtable session, participants will be guided through a scenario-based design activity.
Lunch
Changing cultural attitudes, what’s the future for gender equality & violence
- Whose responsibility is it to design for safety when tech is accelerating faster than safeguards?
- Unpacking the lessons from the Grok image scandal
- From intent to impact: how design choices shape real-world harm or protection
- Gendered risk in digital systems: how bias and abuse scale through technology
- Trust in design: cultivating and sustaining it

Jasmin Bedir
CEO, Innocean Australia
Founder, Fckthecupcakes

Yasmin London
Chief Executive Officer & Founder
First Movers Co

Zoe Jay Hawkins
Co-Founder & Deputy Executive Director
Tech Policy Design Institute
How can you look after your employees who are supporting customers experiencing vulnerability?
- Designing care for the carers: Protecting employees who support customers experiencing vulnerability
- Building safe systems for those on the frontline
- Designing psychological safety into customer care

David Burroughs
Chief Mental Health Officer
Westpac
Afternoon tea
Respect & Protect – Setting the standard for acceptable customer behaviour
What happens when businesses draw a clear line and say, “Our products will not be used to abuse”?
This session brings together organisations that have banned the misuse of their products with a simple change to terms and conditions as part of the ‘Respect & Protect’ initiative. They’ll share lessons, challenges and the impact of setting explicit standards of customer behaviour – and invite others to help make this the norm, not the exception.

Colin Jowell
Founder
BillWill

Fleur Davidson
Senior Manager Customer Vulnerability
Commonwealth Bank

Jo Egan
Chief Customer Officer
AGL
Closing remarks and end of conference
Location: ParkRoyal, Darling Harbour, Sydney
Or online: Can’t attend in person? Join the online interactive conference. Access the full conference online with excellent connectivity facilitated by our premier event platform and experienced IT, AV and delivery teams
Pricing
Early bird savings until 2 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $500 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 24 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $300 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 22 May
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $200 off the standard rate
Price after early bird
+GST
Standard rate
Early bird savings until 2 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $500 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 24 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $300 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 22 May
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $200 off the standard rate
Price after early bird
+GST
Standard rate
Early bird savings until 2 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $500 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 24 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $300 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 22 May
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $200 off the standard rate
Price after early bird
+GST
Standard rate
Early bird savings until 2 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $500 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 24 April
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $300 off the standard rate
Early bird savings until 22 May
+GST
Early bird rate
Save $200 off the standard rate
Price after early bird
+GST
Standard rate
Groups of 5-8 save 10%
Groups of 9-11 save 15%
Groups of 12+ save 20%
