Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked across every facet of retail financial services in Ireland. In 2012, I took up the challenge of building Ireland’s first independent investment platform – which thankfully reached significant scale in an environment that fought really hard against new entrants.
One of the consistent themes across that experience has been the role technology plays in either opening up the market or holding it back.
It always seemed to me that the incumbents in the industry were making proposition and technology choices rooted in a philosophy of “playing not to lose”, instead of “playing to win”. Protective, not expansionist. Worried, not brave.
It meant the same firms chasing the same pots of wealth, instead of actively looking to create new ones for a new generation of savers and investors.
To change that, the infrastructure underneath investment propositions needs to change, too.
And that’s exactly the opportunity I see for us in Ireland and beyond – and why so many in the industry are excited to see Seccl establishing in Europe. “IYKYK”, as my 14-year-old daughter would say – although she doesn’t allow me to say it in public. Oops.
Why Ireland?
When I first engaged with Seccl, it was great to hear the team articulate its rationale for and commitment to starting its European journey in Ireland.
Ireland has a strong financial services ecosystem, a deep talent pool and has become a major distribution hub for firms operating across Europe. For many UK and US firms, it’s a familiar and credible jurisdiction from which to build a broader European presence. It has great people too – some of whom are now coming to work for us. Watch this space.
Despite being a major global financial services hub for the funds industry, the Irish savings and investment market has been underserved for a long time.
Not just in Ireland, but across Europe, there has been plenty of discussion about how to move stubborn deposits into productive use and help more people participate in capital markets. But progress has often been slowed by technology, market structure and a lack of firms focused on simple, scalable propositions for first-time investors.
Ireland now has a chance to take a lead. The proposed Personal Investment Account could become an important catalyst for first-time investors, helping people start investing more easily and build long-term habits. We’ll talk much more about the PIA in due course, but the direction of travel is clear: Ireland wants to broaden access to investing, and that will require the right infrastructure underneath it.
The infrastructure problem
A lot of legacy investment infrastructure was designed around a traditional investor: someone with a larger pot of wealth, well into their career and life milestones, with established financial services relationships and a relatively fixed way of interacting with their investments.
That doesn’t reflect how people manage money today. We live in an app-based culture, where people expect money to move instantly, access to be straightforward and digital journeys to feel familiar. That isn’t just a younger demographic asking for something different – it’s a broader shift in baseline expectations.
The challenge is that a better front-end experience only gets you so far. If the infrastructure underneath is old, fragmented or too manual, it becomes very difficult to build simple, cost-effective and trusted propositions at scale.
I’ve walked in those shoes, held back by immovable systems. You want to build a great product – but you find that the legacy technology underneath forces you to compromise, water down the outcomes and build bland.
That’s where Seccl’s model is so relevant. It means you don’t have to settle for bland – you can pursue growth through the bold, technicolour proposition of your own choosing.
What Seccl has already shown in its home market
Seccl already supports firms in the UK that have brought investing to much broader audiences.
In the advised market, we support firms such as Söderberg & Partners, the major Nordic wealth management group that has launched in the UK with its own technology-led advice proposition.
We also support mainstream digital brands bringing investing to new audiences. Through firms like Monzo, Chip and GoHenry, Seccl has helped power propositions designed for customers who may not have engaged with investing through traditional wealth channels, but who expect simple digital journeys, fast money movement and an experience that fits naturally into how they already manage their finances.
And the opportunity isn’t limited to individual retail consumers, either. Our recently announced partnership with Tide shows how access to investments can also extend into small business audiences, helping serve a crucial part of our economy that has too often been overlooked.
The common thread is the need for modern infrastructure with the breadth, flexibility and automation to support accessible, scalable investment propositions across different routes to market. Firms who engage with Seccl aren’t playing “not to lose” – they’re playing to win.
Europe’s wider moment
While Ireland is the perfect first step, the opportunity is much broader. Across Europe, there’s growing momentum behind a more outcome-focused investment market: one that helps ordinary savers access long-term investment opportunities, while also supporting wider European goals around growth, innovation and more resilient capital markets.
That will require infrastructure that makes investing viable at much smaller levels of contribution. It needs to support first-time investors and digital journeys, while allowing firms to scale without adding excessive cost or operational complexity.
For Seccl, the opportunity is to build on what we’ve already proven in the UK and bring it into Europe in a focused, repeatable way: reusing the core technology, automation and operating experience that already supports a wide range of propositions, while localising where each market genuinely differs – whether that’s regulation, tax, reporting, asset availability, payments or customer expectations.
So Ireland is where that journey begins. If we get it right, success won’t just be measured by the scale of the platform, but by whether we help more firms open up investing to more people – and help those people build confidence, take part and invest well.
It’s exactly the kind of challenge I joined Seccl to help solve, alongside a great team that’s ready to solve it with me.
