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.
The make-up of the core team, and the associates we work with reflects this work. Headed by two leading researchers in this space, The Financial Crime Lab is committed to working with deep experts across academia, practice, policing and law enforcement and people with lived experience of criminal harms.
Dr Nicola Harding
The Financial Crime Lab’s Founder and a Criminologist, Nicola sits at the intersection of research, policy and practice in financial crime prevention.
Prof Sarah Kingston
Sarah is a Professor of Criminal Justice & Policing; Research Lead for The National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection, The College of Policing; Seconded Research Lead for Lancashire Constabulary.
Abigail Taylor
Abi is a criminology graduate and Masters student at Liverpool University. She currently undertaking a summer research internship with The financial Crime Lab, where she is building an online harms lived experience panel.
Christopher Sheron
Christopher is a retired Police Officer, formerly of Merseyside Police. He sits on the Board of The Financial Crime Lab offering critical practitioner insight and expertise in counter-terrorism and serious organised crime.
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.
60 Rodney Street
Liverpool
L1 9AD
England
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