Malcolm Hurlston is a social entrepreneur who founded the Registry Trust in 1985, the Employee Share Ownership Centre in 1987 and the charitable Foundation for Credit Counselling in 1992. He continues to chair the first two organisations but stepped down from the latter in 2010.

Registry Trust runs the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines for the Ministry of Justice, and collects judgment information from other jurisdictions in the British Isles and Ireland. It led the creation of the Foundation for Credit Counselling, which now has over 800 staff and has helped more than a million people in debt.

Hurlston conceived the trades union bank Unity in 1980 and started the Employee Share Ownership Centre to bring leveraged employee share ownership to Europe.

He is working on a number of new sector projects, including Credit Counselling South Africa. Additionally he chairs the Financial Inclusion Centre; the education charity, Credit Action; CCCS Scotland; European Centre for Employee Ownership; and is a member of HM Treasury's Retail Financial Services Forum.

Educated at Cambridge, where he was a major scholar, he was trained as a Russian interrogator during national service. He then worked as a journalist, television trainer and lobbyist advising mainly multinational companies.