Octopus will grow its shareholding in Seccl as the two co-founders depart the investment platform business.
Seccl’s co-founders, Dave Harvey and Hugo Thorman, will depart the company on March 11, and, following this, Octopus has opted to expand its majority stake in the business.
Octopus Group board member and Seccl chair, Ruth Handcock, said: “Seccl is a once-in-a-generation business, on the cusp of dramatically redefining the economics and customer expectations of our industry.”
Handcock added that Octopus was convinced of Seccl’s potential in 2019 when it first acquired the business and is “all the more convinced today”.
This surety comes from watching the company “continue to go from strength to strength over the past four years”.
She additionally stated that, with David Ferguson at the helm the company is “perfectly positioned to win - and we at Octopus are with them for the journey”.
Seccl
Seccl was founded by Harvey and Thorman after their departure from Ascentric, which Thorman led as CEO and Harvey supported in a number of senior technology roles.
The founders designed the company around modern, cloud-native and API-first software principles, in a bid to usher in a “new era” within the platform market.
This would involve prioritising operational efficiency, lowered costs, improved customer experience, and rapid and continued product innovation within the market.
Seccl was then acquired by Octopus in 2019, while still pre-market, providing “strong” financial backing and allowing it to accelerate its technology investment in preparation for future growth.
Since then, the firm has developed a number of market-leading products, services and tools, including its fully automated SIPP, which launched last year.
Harvey said: “I started Seccl with the belief that change was desperately needed and having taken that idea from its humble beginnings in a garden shed to where the company is today, it feels like the right time to step away.
“Under Ferguson’s leadership and with an experienced and now well embedded senior team, I know that the company is in safe hands - and have every faith that it will continue to flourish.”
Thorman added: “I look forward to continuing to interact with Seccl in my position as chair of P1 Investment Management.”
Earlier this week, FT Adviser revealed Kimberley Campbell, head of growth at Seccl, would leave to join Parmenion as commercial development director.
Campbell joined Seccl in May 2023 to lead its sales and platform launch efforts, prior to this appointment she was head of strategic partnerships at Origo.
tom.dunstan@ft.com
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