Investments aren’t working

Ruth Handcock

Ruth is the former CEO of Octopus Investments and chair of Seccl. So far in her career, she's had fourteen jobs: newspaper deliverer, car washer, checkout operative, factory salad chopper (night shift), receptionist, lab technician, editor, consultant, government adviser, COO, finance director, chief of staff, head of customer and CEO.

She's now working in a new role that will see her lead the Octopus drive to help more people get access to help with their money… but is very happy to know that whatever Octopus throws at her, she doesn't have to worry about chopping off her thumb at 3am.

“I love that at Octopus every day is completely different. We have big ambitions to change the industry we work in and invest into sectors that have a huge impact on the world we live in. That will take a lot of work, but it's exactly the kind of challenge I relish.”

David Ferguson

David joined Seccl as CEO in April 2022. He has overall accountability for the company's strategic direction: it's his job to make sure that we deliver on our collective ambition and market opportunity.

He was previously founder and CEO of Nucleus, where he created a distinctive and customer-led culture that helped the investment platform to grow from start-up to £20bn in AUA when he departed.

Kirsty Lynagh

Kirsty is responsible for cultivating a high- performance culture here at Seccl, and holds executive accountability for executive performance, people, communications and proposition. She joined in June 2022.

Kirsty's human centric yet first principles approach has been shaped over twenty years, during which she has adopted non-traditional methods to delivering people strategies that enable inclusive, engaged and performing workplaces.

She worked with Dave Ferguson at Nucleus, where she spent seven years as chief people officer there.

Alex Henderson

Alex holds executive responsibility for Seccl's risk and compliance functions, ensuring the business is organised to continue to meet its regulatory obligations - and perform robust risk management practices as it grows.

She joined in January 2023, having spent twenty years performing risk, external audit and finance roles within financial services.

Her last nine years were with Virgin Money, where she was part of the risk leadership team in various senior risk positions such as head of risk governance, reporting & frameworks, head of operational risk, head of prudential risk, and latterly as head of capital management in finance.

Prior to Virgin Money, Alex held credit risk management positions in Royal Bank of Scotland, after training for her chartered accountancy qualification with Deloitte.

James Holmes

James joined Seccl in 2019, having previously worked at Octopus on the team that led the company's acquisition. He became chief commercial officer in the summer of 2023 - and is responsible for finding and winning new business among Seccl's target market, helping new platforms go live as quickly and efficiently as possible, and ensuring all clients receive a world-class offline service.

Tom Harris

Tom joined Seccl in September 2024 and is responsible for leading our technology vision, with executive accountability for all aspects of our engineering, data and information security functions.

Prior to joining Seccl Tom was CTO at ClearBank where he lead the expansion of the technology team from 40 to over 300 employees. During his tenure, he significantly contributed to the bank's growth and profitability, scaling its technical operations from processing just a few payments a day to handling millions of transactions.

Prior to ClearBank, Tom gained technology leadership experience leading at organisations such as Just Eat where he experienced Just Eat's IPO and technology growth to become a FTSE100 company. In total, he has more than 20 years of engineering experience working with high-scale, successful cloud and data platforms.

He is also co-founder of Build Circle, a successful software engineering consultancy, working with companies like Zopa, Allica Bank, PayPoint, Moonpig covering Tech and the E-commerce industry.