Maria Harris Director of Lending Atom Bank

Director of Lending at Atom Bank, Maria has created and launched a new intermediary lender designed to engage and attract intermediaries and their customers to a lending proposition designed solely for digital.  With over 20 years’ experience in management, Maria has held roles across a number of sectors including travel, utilities and financial services. Before moving to Atom, Maria was Sales Director at Engage Mutual, responsible for leading the sales teams through a merger to become One Family.  Prior to that, she held senior roles in the intermediary sector with Lloyd's Banking Group and Leeds Building Society.

Nick Harding Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Lending Works

Nick co-founded and is CEO of Lending Works, the UK’s leading disrupter in providing of personal loans through partnerships. Lending Works’ ultimate goal is to create the UK’s leading consumer credit business, providing a range of innovative consumer credit products, all with game-changing customer experience.

While working in the financial services industry, Nick recognised that the mindset adopted by most financial services companies was simply wrong. Instead, Nick and the team are passionate about making people’s lives better by providing simple and fair financial products.

Since launching in 2014, individual and institutional investors have lent almost £200m to 30,000 creditworthy people via the Lending Works platform. Lending Works forecasts to grow to £1bn of loans per annum by 2022. Equity investors in the business include VCs and credit fund managers.

Andy Piggott Director of Lending Products Metro Bank

Andy is Director of Lending Products at Metro Bank – he has responsibility for the bank’s mortgage, credit card and loan products, for both retail customers and SMEs. Before joining Metro Bank in September 2018, Andy worked at TSB, where he ran the Credit Cards business, and previously the Personal Current Accounts business. He previously held a number of roles at Lloyds Banking Group and as a strategy consultant with Marakon Associates, which he joined after leaving Cambridge University.

Rob Cox Decision Services Director TransUnion

Robert Cox joined TransUnion in 2012 and leads the Decision Services Team which provides all of the company’s decisioning solutions. This involves understanding the needs of customers wanting to implement changes to their decisioning technology, and then designing, delivering and maintaining solutions that improve processes and benefit both customers and consumers.

With over 23 years in the industry, Robert’s expertise spans the complete credit lifecycle; including acquisitions, account and customer management, fraud and collections.

His management experience has included enabling teams to optimise portfolio profitability, running collections strategies across multiple operational centres (insourced, outsourced and offshore), building acquisition and loyalty solutions, and designing multi-bureau services.

Robert holds a degree in Statistics and has previously worked for GE Capital, Scorex, IKANO Financial Services and New Day.

Lindley Gooden Broadcast Journalist and Professional Chair

Lindley Gooden is a journalist and filmmaker who has worked at the very top levels of British broadcasting and news since the early 1990s.

He has worked in national radio and television as:

• A Senior BBC Journalist
• A presenter on channels as diverse as BBC One, Radio 1, BBC Three and Five and a range of other national and regional radio stations.
• The Consumer Affairs Correspondent on Sky News and Five

Prior to his years in the national media, he was known as the most successful Head of News in local commercial radio – launching new services and dramatically raising audience share and reach, using tools that have since been adopted by radio groups across the UK.

Lindley now works with companies, charities, government and other organisations creating and delivering their own media needs.