Charities and Endowments
We believe that every charity is unique, so we take a bespoke approach to helping your charity achieve your investment goals.
It’s fundamentally important to understand what your requirements are from your investments, in particular your balance between short term income and long term returns. We take this, as well as how you work as a charity, into account before advising you on the most appropriate investment approach.
We can help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of the financial markets, whilst ensuring you keep up to date with regulatory responsibilities, such as those laid out in the recently updated Charity Commission guidance. With decades of experience across both investment consulting and research, XPS offers insightful independent and impartial advice to the sector.
“XPS took the time to understand our requirements and delivered to those needs in a timely manner. We are pleased to retain XPS to help us review the performance of our assets and we are very happy with their service.”
Frank Curtiss, Chair of Trustees, Chartered Secretaries Charitable Trust
Our Charity and Endowment investment services
Working in partnership with our clients, our experienced investment team can support your team in a variety of areas. In line with the expectations of the Charity Commission, we support the use of an appropriate ongoing governance and advice structure to ensure each charity achieves the most out of its investments. Our services include:
- Investment review: How do your investment arrangements stack up with recently updated guidance for charities? We can deliver a high-level assessment of your current arrangements.
- Investment Policy Statement (IPS) formulation: Do you have in place a concise, clear statement setting out your investment policy? We can assist you in drafting this statement to ensure it meets both your and the regulator’s requirements.
- Investment Monitoring: How often do you meet your investment managers to review their performance? We have developed monitoring reports tailored for charities that set out this information in an easy-to-digest and informative way.
- Strategic review and advice: Given the ever-changing investment landscape, ensuring your strategy remains appropriate and reflective of your long-term objectives is fundamental. We can deliver concise analysis of the impact and risks involved in changing investment strategy to enable you to decide on what approach is right for you.
- ESG and sustainable investment: Our deep understanding of ESG risk issues allows us to offer expert advice to clients on how best to integrate these into their investment process. We have also helped many clients develop sustainable investment strategies that help with their transition to net zero.
- Asset allocation and manager selection: Our vast experience of working with fund managers, as well as our independence from them, ensures that we are able to build an investment strategy, and an investment manager line up that is best placed to manage individual components of your strategy.
- Reviewing costs: Do you understand all the costs being incurred in the investment of your portfolio? We can provide a full cost transparency analysis so that you can truly assess value for money.
- Asset Transitions: XPS can assist with the monitoring, planning, and implementing asset transitions between investment managers to minimize any market risks and transaction costs where possible.
- Training: We host teach-in sessions with Trustees to give them the knowledge to make better informed investment decisions, including asset class-specific sessions. For smaller charities, this may also include how to get the most out of their fund manager meetings and to help understand reports and supporting documents.
To learn more about our charities and endowment services, get in touch with our team to discuss your requirements or to request your complimentary investment review.
Case Study
Giving a charity confidence to set a long term growth investment strategy
The Challenge
This charity had largely been investing in cash deposits which had grown over the years, with a small allocation to growth assets. However, their Trustees had questioned whether they could achieve more with their portfolio - that is where we stepped in.
Our Solution
We used our investment beliefs questionnaire to gather Trustees’ views across a range of areas, including both attitude to risk and environmental and ethical factors. We then had an initial session with the Trustees to summarise their responses and agree a set of beliefs and objectives that informed our subsequent analysis.
XPS then prepared an investment strategy review which outlined our proposals for the types of investment funds that would most suitably meet their needs, and then followed this up with a manager selection exercise to choose a short-list of investment managers for interview.
The Trustees then reviewed this short-list and agreed to interview 3 potential candidates for the role, each of whom also complied with the Trustees responsible investment policy.
Once the Trustees had agreed the successful candidates, we worked to implement this, and review their Investment Policy Statement. XPS is now retained to deliver regular reporting to the Trustees and attend an annual review meeting.
Added Value
The Trust’s portfolios are now targeting materially higher expected returns which has allowed the charity to deliver additional support grants to help their beneficiaries with the cost of living crisis in particular.
Insights and briefings
Responsible investing for wider society
Our values include being ambitious and doing the right thing. If we are to be true to these, then the benefits of our responsible investing expertise need to extend to wider society. In line with this, we provide detailed feedback to all investment managers we assess across all aspects including ESG, particularly on areas where they have not scored well, to drive improvements in their processes and practices.