What happened: British investment-as-a-service provider Seccl has received new funding from its owner, Octopus (Finextra). Octopus is one part a financial service company and one part an energy provider in the UK, and it acquired Seccl in 2019.
My comment: The news is nothing major but represents something you see in the overall market. Seccl, its British competitor Wealthkernel, and its German counterparts Lemon Markets and Upvest have had multiple expansion and partnership announcements during the last few months (maybe more will follow during M2020?). Additionally, not only direct competitors but also similar providers such as Evergreen, Ginmon, and Sutor Bank have increased their focus on partnerships.
However, the focus of all these companies seems to remain mainly on companies from the financial service industry and not so much on non-financial brands. Embedded Investments tend to be one of the Embedded Finance areas with the lowest number of existing use cases. However, you can argue that infrastructure providers from banking and lending also started selling to fintech companies and banks before focusing on non-financial brands. So, perhaps we will soon see more announcements from HR tools, energy providers, and travel companies offering investment products.
