How Octopus Money’s Business Model Fools Everyone—Even the King
By Steve Conley, Academy of Life Planning
Octopus Money has won accolades, headlines, and now even a royal honour. Its CEO, Ruth Handcock, has been awarded an OBE for “services to financial services and investments,” lauded for democratizing access to financial help.
But behind the glossy PR and noble language lies a hard commercial truth.
Beneath the promises of empowerment and inclusion is a system that—by design—funnels unwitting consumers into fee-paying, product-selling advisory services, under the guise of impartial coaching. It’s a model that fools customers. It fools customers. It even creates a misleading impression on trusted platforms like VouchedFor—a review site that exists to build consumer trust through verified client feedback.
Octopus Money receives high ratings on VouchedFor—but this reflects positive client reviews, not an endorsement of their commercial model. The platform itself does not rate firms, but surfaces reviews from users, which can mask deeper structural conflicts not visible in a star rating.
It even fools idealistic recruits who believe they’re entering a helping profession—only to walk away disillusioned when they realise it’s a sales job in disguise.
🧩 The Setup
Octopus Money markets its “Money Coaches” as accessible professionals who help people organise, understand, and take control of their finances. It’s portrayed as a remedy to the “advice gap” afflicting millions priced out of regulated advice.
But here’s the catch: coaches are financially incentivised to convert clients into users of paid “Advisory Services.” In practice, this means identifying potential investment assets, gathering fact-find information, and nudging clients toward regulated financial advisers—sometimes within the same organisation.
Far from remaining independent, coaches function as on-ramps to intermediation. There is no true firewall between the coaching and advice divisions. The financial model depends on those referrals converting—because without them, there’s no viable revenue stream.
This isn’t coaching. It’s prospecting.
🔄 The Internal Fallout
Several former Octopus Money Coaches have come forward to describe the internal disillusionment. They joined believing they would provide meaningful guidance to everyday people. What they encountered instead was a metrics-driven environment where the real value was measured in how many clients they could pass along to product providers.
The disappointment runs deep. Many left after realising they were essentially there to tee up clients for regulated salespeople—not to solve problems, empower behaviour change, or offer ongoing financial clarity.
These are well-intentioned professionals who wanted to make a difference. What they found was financial theatre, choreographed to build trust—before directing people into a funnel with a clear commercial endpoint.
🏛️ Fooling the System
The true tragedy is how well the model has been dressed up to look virtuous.
- Customers believe they’re getting impartial help.
- Regulators believe the unregulated coaching sidesteps conduct risk.
- Awards panels believe it’s a social good.
- And now the Crown itself has rewarded it with an OBE.
But when the dust settles, the public will see this for what it is: an elegant workaround to rebuild intermediation through a soft front door.
This is not about solving the advice gap. It is about repackaging distribution.
⚠️ The Bigger Picture
Octopus Money is not alone. It reflects a wider systemic problem: the financial industry’s inability—or unwillingness—to provide help without steering clients toward products. The model conflates support with sales, eroding trust and masking commercial interests under a benevolent façade.
When even the monarch is handing out honours to those who perpetuate this illusion, we know how far the rot has spread.
We don’t need better marketing for old models. We need a reimagining of financial planning itself—where empowerment comes without strings, and where financial coaching is not a covert pipeline to product sales.
🛡️ A Call to Integrity
True democratisation of financial help is not about scaling distribution—it’s about scaling autonomy. It means:
- Teaching people how to plan, not how to buy.
- Rewarding guidance, not conversion.
- Protecting the boundary between education and sales.
If we continue to reward the illusion, we will only deepen the disillusionment. And more coaches—more customers—will pay the price.
Note: VouchedFor is the UK’s leading review site for financial and mortgage advisers. While this article critiques business models that blur the line between coaching and sales, it is not a criticism of VouchedFor, whose mission to promote transparency and trust is one I wholeheartedly support.
🔁 How the Octopus Referral Model Works
Octopus Money operates a commercial referral scheme that financially rewards advisers—and by extension, coaches working as appointed representatives—for converting clients into paid advisory relationships.
According to the Octopus Money website:
- £75 is paid for each referred client who signs up.
- This scales to £1,000 for every 10 clients, and £6,000 for every 50.
- Bonus payments apply if referred clients have investable assets over £75,000.
This structure makes it clear that Octopus Money’s commercial model relies in part on affiliate income from referrals to regulated advisers.
While this fee structure is transparently disclosed on adviser-focused pages, it is not immediately visible to clients engaging with coaching services—raising questions about perceived impartiality and potential conflicts of interest.
💬 What Coaches Say from Inside the Octopus Model
Employee reviews offer a revealing glimpse into the internal pressures faced by Octopus Money Coaches—many of whom expected to help clients but discovered their earnings depended on converting them.
📌 Firsthand testimonials from Glassdoor reveal:
“Pretty poor pay for the amount of working hours. Obviously the better you convert, the better the pay…”
– Former Coach
“No guarantee of income. All being well, and you sign clients, it works out around £20–40 an hour.”
– Former Coach
These accounts suggest that coaches are compensated not for providing ongoing guidance—but for how many clients they convert into regulated advisory relationships.
🧭 The implication: Coaches are not neutral guides. They are incentivised—directly and financially—to act as introducers. This introduces a built-in conflict of interest that undermines the impartiality many clients reasonably expect from a service labelled “coaching.”
Your Money or Your Life
Unmask the highway robbers – Enjoy wealth in every area of your life!
By Steve Conley. Available on Amazon. Visit www.steve.conley.co.uk to find out more.
Academy of Life Planning 