Author: Catherine Fitzpatrick

Catherine is Founder & Director of independent consultancy Flequity Ventures. A former bank executive, she works with businesses to reimagine and redesign products and services to be more flexible, safe and equitable for their customers experiencing vulnerability. In particular, she wants to inspire innovation to disrupt financial abuse and address gender bias in financial products in a commercially sustainable way. Catherine is the author of Designed to Disrupt: Reimagining banking products to improve financial safety – the first of a series of discussion papers for the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety. Recognised nationally in 2018 as an AFR|Qantas 100 Women of Influence, she advises the Commonwealth Government on workplace and customer responses to domestic and financial abuse as the only business representative appointed to the National Plan Advisory Group. She is Chair of the Australian National University’s Student Safety and Wellbeing Committee, Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales School of Social Sciences and a member of the Monash Safe and Equal @ Work Advisory Board.

December 5, 2023 by Catherine Fitzpatrick

For domestic violence victim-survivors, a data or privacy breach can be extraordinarily dangerous

A suite of recent cybersecurity data breaches highlight an urgent need to overhaul how companies and government agencies handle our data. But these incidents pose particular risks to victim-survivors of domestic violence. The onus is on service providers – such as utilities, telcos, internet companies and government agencies – to ensure they don’t risk the safety of their most vulnerable customers by being careless with their data. Read More