Seccl, the Octopus-owned embedded investment platform, has added further strength to its senior team as it continues to rapidly scale.
Kim Campbell joins in May as Seccl as head of growth, drawing on her 20 years of financial services experience to lead the company’s sales and platform launch efforts. For the past 12 years Campbell has specialised in bringing platform and investment solutions to market, most recently as Head of Strategic Partnerships at Origo.
“I am super excited to be joining Seccl at such an important and pivotal time for our market”, Campbell explained. “The platform sector is on the cusp of transformational change, driven by fast-evolving consumer expectations, a watershed moment in regulation, and ongoing advances in technology. Seccl is right at the heart of these dynamics, and I can’t wait to play a part.”
Nadine Barham, meanwhile, joins next week as Seccl’s new head of operations. Barham has worked within the platform industry for the last 15 years, more recently running operations, oversight and change delivery teams for Abrdn’s Elevate and Wrap propositions.
Seccl has already developed the most efficient operational engine in the market, with a lean 12-person operations team that oversaw nearly 6 million transactions in 2022 alone, supporting 128,000 investors and counting.
Reporting directly into Seccl’s CEO, David Ferguson, Barham will continue to lead the company’s drive for intelligent automation and hyper-efficiency, as it seeks to transform the economics and customer experience of the platform sector for the better.
“Seccl has a great team that is setting a new benchmark of quality”, Barham said. “It’s not often that you get the opportunity to re-evaluate the fundamentals within a sector – and I’m excited to be in a position where we can continually ask ‘how good could this be?’, rather than simply ‘how can we get by?’”
Finally, Tom Richards has joined the helm as Seccl’s head of engineering, reporting into the recently appointed chief technology officer, Adam Jones. He joins from Ada Fintech, the investment research technology company built and owned by Redington, where he headed up a 60-person engineering department.
Since the appointment of David Ferguson as Seccl’s new CEO nearly a year ago, the company has quadrupled its client base and bolstered its executive team, most recently with the appointment of Alex Henderson as chief risk officer.
Commenting on the news, David Ferguson, CEO of Seccl, said:
“It is becomingly clear that most wrap platforms continue to fail the digital test, seem unable to manage their technology vendors and don’t achieve the operational scalability required to remain competitive on fees. In this context, the search for digital alternatives that offer greater control and improve the customer experience – all at lower cost – will only gather pace.
“Technology excellence and operational hyper-efficiency will be the difference between growth and decline, and so there’s no better time for Tom, Nadine and Kim to join the fray. I look forward to seeing the impact they’ll undoubtedly have on Seccl and the market at large.”