About Oculus Wealth

Why independence

For most of my career, I worked inside a large institutional wealth manager (Investec Wealth & Investment), where I advised on over £100m of client wealth across some of the most complex situations the firm took on.

It was a good place to learn, and a good place from which to see clearly what restricted advice actually means. Inside an institutional firm, the scope of advice is necessarily constrained. You recommend from a defined panel of products, almost always built around the in-house platform. The clients I was working with on the largest and most complex situations such as business owners preparing to sell, executives sitting on significant equity, families thinking about generational wealth were almost always the clients who least needed restricted advice. They needed recommendations shaped by their circumstances rather than by the firm’s distribution model.

Joining Oculus Wealth in April 2025 was the only way to do that work properly. Whole-of-market means we are not constrained to a panel of in-house funds, platforms, or managers. No commissions are earned anywhere in the chain. Fees are agreed in pounds and pence before any chargeable work begins. The recommendation is determined by your situation rather than by what is on the platform.

That distinction matters. For sophisticated clients, the difference between independent and restricted advice is not abstract, it is often the largest single financial decision they make in the year they make it.

Who we work with

We work with business owners, founders, and senior executives, from £1m of investable assets upwards. Most clients come to us at an inflection point whether that is preparing for a sale, structuring an executive package, deploying the proceeds of an exit, or planning the next generation of family wealth.

The clients we serve tend to share a few things in common. They are financially literate and have already done a meaningful amount of thinking themselves. They have, in many cases, been through a private bank or a restricted adviser and want something different. They want recommendations that are honest about trade-offs, conversations that go deeper than product selection, and a fee structure they can read on a single page.

If that is the kind of relationship you are looking for, the discovery session is a thirty-minute conversation to find out whether the fit is there.

Independent Wealth Management

Sebastian Culpan-Scott CFP™

Chartered Wealth Manager, Certified Financial Planner, and Director of Oculus Wealth Management

I qualified as a Chartered Wealth Manager and Certified Financial Planner during my time at Investec Wealth & Investment, and was a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI).

My professional focus is on the technical planning that surrounds significant liquidity events including pre-sale structuring for business owners, executive compensation planning, post-exit deployment, and the inheritance and succession planning that runs alongside all of it. The work is genuinely cross-disciplinary, most engagements involve coordination with a tax adviser, a corporate finance team, and legal counsel, and a meaningful part of my role is making sure those decisions hold together across the advisers involved.

I write regularly on LinkedIn about the technical issues that come up in this work, pension carry forward, BADR structuring, post-exit deployment, executive equity, and the planning conversations that get harder rather than easier after a business sells. The articles are written with the reader in mind. If a client or potential client of mine reads one of those posts and finds it useful, the post is doing its job.

Qualifications

  • Certified Financial Planner (CFP™)

  • Chartered Wealth Manager (CISI Level 7)

  • CISI Level 6 Certificate in Advanced Financial Planning

  • CISI Level 4 Investment Advice Diploma

  • CFA Institute Certificate in ESG Investing

In the press

Featured in The Times and The Sunday Times

Outside of work

Outside the firm, the priorities are my wife, training, and travel (usually long-haul). I boxed for several years and was previously part of the Elite Player Development Programme at Bath Rugby Academy. I have had the privilege of travelling around large parts of North America, Australia, and New Zealand, plus a fair amount of Europe.

I also have an ongoing interest in human performance and longevity.

Speak with us

A complimentary discovery session is the right starting point. Thirty minutes, no obligation, an honest view of whether independent advice is the right fit for your situation.