Nick Harness has over 30 year’s experience in business start-ups and regeneration across various markets. Nick was instrumental in the growth of the background checking industry and identity validation services in the UK and until 2011, Nick was director at Experian Background Checking following his initial start-up of BackgroundChecking.com in 2002 and the eventual acquisition of the business by Experian in 2006.

Nick was similarly key to the growth and development of TrustID to being one of the market leading identity validation providers and moved on to form The Identity Organisation once TrustID was established. Nick is also one of the Committee Members and Founder Members of the ADVP (Association of Document Validation Professionals) the trade body representing the UK's Identity Sector and is a regular speaker at industry events and an advisor to both the public and private sectors on the topic of both identity and application fraud.

Currently Nick is involved within the digital identity, identity validation, data security and fraudulent data sharing arena, working closely with Central Government agencies and other public sector organisations to help combat the major issue of identity crime. In addition, Nick provides consultancy services to both public and private sector organisations around the challenges that digital identity provides in relationship to regulatory updates to Money Laundering Regulations (MLD5) and JMLSG Guidance on EID&V in line with eIDAS and the recent British Standard, PAS 499.

With the current Cyber Attack threat, Nicks experience has been extended into cyber security and cyber security awareness training for employees in the UK to avoid data breach and loss for organisations. This expertise has grown in to providing consultancy around the above regulations and the linkage in to the Cyber Security market such as Cyber Essentials.