Nicola completed a PhD in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, specialising in creative approaches to integrating Lived Experience into criminological understanding. This led to her becoming an internationally recognised expert in fraud, identity, and the social dynamics of financial crime. She later became the Director of the Centre for Crime, Law and Justice at Lancaster University, where she remained as an academic until early 2024. Nicola is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Her work sits at the intersection of behavioural science, financial crime prevention, organisational strategy, and public trust. She is best known for translating complex human problems into practical commercial and policy insight, particularly in environments where credibility, risk, and reputation matter.

Nicola is the Founder of Just For Good and Co-Founder of The Financial Crime Lab. Across both organisations, she works with businesses, financial institutions, technology firms, and public sector organisations to strengthen trust, reduce vulnerability to harm, and build authority that can withstand scrutiny. Her background is unusual because it bridges worlds that rarely speak to one another well.

She has worked across academia, financial crime prevention, behavioural research, communications, public policy, and commercial strategy. That means she understands not only how criminals exploit systems, but also how organisations unintentionally create the conditions for harm through product design, incentives, messaging, leadership, and culture. This perspective has made her a trusted advisor to organisations navigating fraud, safeguarding, reputational risk, digital trust, AI credibility, and consumer vulnerability.

Nicola has become known for her research spanning all aspects of financial crime and social harms, such as her paper on  “Liminality of Fraud,” published in the British Journal of Criminology. Her work explored how modern fraud operates within blurred boundaries between physical and digital life – an idea that has become increasingly relevant in an AI-driven world where legitimacy itself is becoming harder to assess.

Alongside her academic work, Nicola has led and contributed to major fraud prevention initiatives involving banks, fintechs, universities, law enforcement, regulators, and technology companies. Her work on youth financial exploitation and money mule prevention helped shape national campaigns adopted across much of the UK higher education sector. In 2024, she was appointed as a Specialist Advisor to the UK Home Office.

Today, her work increasingly focuses on trust as infrastructure.

In an environment where anyone can appear credible online, organisations face a growing challenge: visibility is easy, but authority is difficult. AI can generate confidence at scale, but confidence is not competence. Nicola helps organisations navigate that distinction.

Her consultancy work spans fraud prevention strategy, behavioural risk, executive authority, thought leadership, safeguarding, prevention by design, trust and safety, and reputational resilience. She works particularly closely with organisations operating in high-trust or high-risk sectors, including financial services, fintech, cybersecurity, AI, regulation, and technology.

She is also a keynote speaker and commentator on fraud, trust, behavioural manipulation, and institutional credibility. Her talks often explore the uncomfortable overlap between criminal innovation and legitimate business practice: why scammers are often better at persuasion than brands, how digital systems unintentionally reward manipulation, and what organisations can learn from the psychology of deception.

At the centre of Nicola’s work is a simple idea: Trust is not a marketing exercise. It is a structural condition. The organisations that succeed in the coming decade will not simply be the loudest or the fastest-growing. They will be the ones capable of building systems, products, leadership, and communication that people can genuinely rely on. 

Because in high-trust environments, authority is not claimed – it is designed.