Financial crime is often treated as a technical failure – a glitch to be patched, a rule to be tightened, a system to be monitored more closely. We see it differently.
At The Financial Crime Lab, we understand financial crime as a human, social, and systemic problem. Fraud, scams, and financial exploitation do not emerge in isolation. They take shape inside real systems – shaped by policy decisions, product design, organisational culture, economic pressure, and human behaviour. Our work exists to understand those systems as they actually operate, not as they are assumed to work on paper.
Fraud is at an all-time high
Despite unprecedented investment in fraud technology and compliance frameworks, financial crime continues to rise. Losses grow, harm deepens, and responsibility is often fragmented across institutions, platforms, and sectors. We created The Financial Crime Lab to address a gap we kept seeing in practice:
insights trapped in silos
lived experience excluded from decision-making
prevention strategies focused on detection rather than design
and conversations about fraud that avoid its human cost
Our lab provides space to do what day-to-day operations rarely allow: to step back, examine evidence across disciplines, test assumptions, and learn faster than the problem evolves.
experts who want to help
Professor Sarah Kingston, Criminologist
Jodie Fuller,
Senior Strategist
Dr Nicola Harding
Criminologist & Founder
Greg Hancell
Senior Fraud Consultant
From insight to prevention
Understanding financial crime only matters if it leads to action. The Financial Crime Lab exists to turn insight into prevention by examining how fraud and financial exploitation actually occur, and using evidence to redesign the systems that allow harm to happen.
We work with organisations, policymakers, and practitioners who want to move beyond reactive controls and towards prevention by design, asking harder questions about where systems create opportunity for harm, where responsibility falls through the cracks, and how people behave under pressure, fear, or coercion. Our work spans financial services, fintech, policy, fraud prevention, risk, and technology because financial crime does not respect organisational boundaries, and effective prevention cannot either.
We also believe the way we talk about financial crime matters. Instead of fear or cliché, we prioritise clarity, understanding, and systems thinking, creating space for evidence-led insight that reflects the real complexity of modern fraud. Financial crime prevention is not just about stopping crime. It is about building systems where exploitation is harder, slower, and less rewarding, and where people are better protected when harm occurs.
JOIN OUR COMMUNITY
The Financial Crime Lab is built around a simple idea: we’re better at preventing harm when we think together.
Our community brings together fraud and financial crime practitioners, researchers, policymakers, technologists, law enforcement ,and educators who want to move beyond surface-level fixes. People who are curious about why financial crime happens, not just how to detect it. People who care about evidence, lived experience, and the unintended consequences of the systems we design.
3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, London, England, United Kingdom, EC2A 4N
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