Endowments, foundations & charity investment solutions

When choosing an investment firm, look for someone that has global reach, access to highly rated managers and the potential to drive down fees through economies of scale. You should also consider whether the investment provider receives any commissions from fund managers that could eat into your gains.

The appointment of an outsourced CIO (OCIO), also known as a fiduciary manager, entails the full or partial outsourcing of your organisation’s investment function to a specialist third party provider. Typically, this will make most sense when you have resource-constraints and wish to focus on other things. When delegating certain investment tasks to a third party, you will typically retain some level of fiduciary responsibility and maintain control over strategic asset allocation decisions.

When providing its services, the OCIO should look to understand your organisation and its needs, and have the implementation expertise to execute your strategy quickly, efficiently and in a risk-controlled manner. This is usually done through the pooling of assets, and so enable you to enjoy the benefits of economies of scale through lower fees as well as access to high quality managers.

Private markets such as infrastructure, private equity, private debt and real estate can all offer you important sources of potential returns and income that are less correlated with public equity and bond markets. However, accessing these opportunities is not easy. When looking for an investment partner, look for someone with scale, experience, and strong relationships with high quality managers around the world which means they may be well-placed to assist you with building an alternative investment portfolio.

Although it’s extremely difficult to predict where the next economic shock will come from, it’s important that your portfolio is designed to react to market changes - including being adequately diversified across asset classes and managers. Achieving the right level of diversification requires expertise.

Our research and strategy team of more than 200 dedicated professionals¹ constantly monitors our rated fund managers and global financial markets to help you navigate the investment world.

We have been helping clients across the globe integrate ESG² considerations within their portfolios since 2004. This includes integration, stewardship, thematic investment and screening. We can help you construct a portfolio and strategy to support your organisation’s wider goals.

From an organisational perspective, we seek to embed sustainability across our advice and implementation work. We are a signatory to the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment, and our Sustainable Investment Policy are freely available for you to access to understand more about how we operate in this field.

A commitment to diversity and inclusion is part of our social responsibility as a global company. Diversity is one of our core values and our work in this area centres on a commitment to employees, our clients, and the communities in which we operate.

Our manager research team embeds cognitive diversity into every strategy that they research. However, asset owners have different criteria around identity diversity and we work with them to identify what is most important to them when selecting managers, so they are well placed to help your organisation address this important global issue.