The deal was agreed in principle in August for £10 million, as Octopus set out its ambition to disrupt the platform technology market that underpins retail financial services.

Seccl aims to help financial advisers, wealth managers, discretionary fund managers, fintechs, or new firms entering the sector, deliver faster, cheaper and more flexible platform solutions to help manage and administer clients’ money. Seccl does this using its best in class open API custody solution, allowing businesses of any size to rapidly build bespoke new investment platforms more easily and at a lower cost.

Octopus has also announced that the outsourced API custody solution will be priced at 0.1% of assets on the platform, with an additional per user cost where the user interface is also used. There will be no costs for set-up or onboarding.

The acquisition comes at a time when many adviser and wealth management firms are struggling with rising costs and limitations of legacy systems, and where there is a growing pressure to provide customers with a smoother and more intuitive user experience.

In addition to the £10 million acquisition, Octopus will provide continued investment as it grows the business. Now the deal has completed, it will look to expand the Seccl team with new engineering, product and design staff.

Sam Handfield-Jones, co-head of Seccl, comments:
“To complete the deal is really exciting and means we can get to work as we set out to realise our ambition. We want to transform the customer and client experience across retail financial services - and Seccl’s technology genuinely has the potential to do that. The response following our first announcement has been incredibly positive and served to demonstrate that the industry is crying out for some new competition.”

Hugo Thorman, co-founder of Seccl, added:
“The industry is ripe for another round of disruption. The technology that we’re developing at Seccl has the potential to drive down costs and improve the customer experience by making it easier than ever for systems to integrate. Being part of Octopus also means we have the financial backing and complementary expertise to make this happen much more quickly.”