Investment advice and solutions for endowments and foundations

We have over 50 years of experience with endowments and foundations, such as charities and not-for-profits. Our independent research, advice and tailored investment solutions aim to help you deliver better investment outcomes, while staying true to your mission.

Ensuring sustainable philanthropy

Each endowment, foundation or charity is unique in its mission and approach, and its investment portfolio should reflect that. Your investments should work to provide long-term growth while reflecting what your organisation stands for. 这需要一种定制的投资方式，以帮助确保不会出现可能破坏你的使命或损害组织声誉的令人不快的意外情况.

Investment considerations for endowment and foundation organisations

  • Alignment

    Aligning your portfolios to your mission demonstrates your commitment to issues important to your organisation. It involves assessing asset managers, strategies and providers to ensure they are aligned to your objectives. 它还需要一个透明的监测和报告框架，以确保投资与您的目标和政策保持一致.

  • Efficiencies 

    Investors are currently faced with market volatility so it’s important to build robust portfolios, and strategic asset allocation, designed to deliver efficiencies and capture opportunities. 你的投资组合应该坚持你的整体风险偏好，并考虑到费用和其他成本如何影响你的财务目标的结果.

  • Expertise

    专业的投资建议可以帮助你驾驭日益复杂的投资市场，并确定与你的目标一致的策略. We can review your investments, including your asset allocation and approach, against your goals and help you identify which areas need to be prioritised. We provide sound advice to help you feel confident in your long-term investment strategy.

  • Flexibility

    重要的是，你的投资组合的设计方式要能对不断变化的环境和市场运动做出反应. 这种灵活性意味着你不会对不利事件猝不及防，你的投资组合也能很好地利用可能出现的潜在机会. We can help you integrate flexibility into your strategy and portfolios.

  • Service standards

    When working with external advisers or consultants, you need to ensure that they have the experience and the capacity to build, manage and monitor your portfolio with the utmost care. We work as an extension of your team to help you address topics most important to you, like alternative investments, or sustainability. This will allow you to focus on other priorities to help achieve your mission.

  • Sustainability

    Investing sustainably is a key goal for many investors. There are a few areas to consider, including environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations; diversity, 公平和包容(DEI)因素和影响投资机会，旨在帮助投资者解决关键问题，而不必在整体财务目标上妥协.

Three steps for reviewing and setting your strategy

你应该仔细地回顾你的目标和信念，并评估它们是否已经改变，以及如何将它们记录下来. Below are some questions to help guide your review:

  • What is your timeframe for investment?
  • What return do you need?
  • How much do you plan to spend?
  • At what point does a market drawdown impact your ability to meet your spending requirements?
  • What are your sustainability goals?
  • What positive impacts do you want your investments to have?
  • Who are your stakeholders and what do they need? For example, is reporting required?

Align investment strategy with your objectives and beliefs. You should consider having a broad opportunity set available across the full range of asset classes.

Consider how your strategy helps you achieve these goals and assess options if it doesn’t. What strategic asset allocation helps you get the return you need, allows you to spend at the rate you need and fits with your risk appetite? How can you ensure your investments make a sustainable, positive impact?

Once you have defined your goals and strategy, 您需要识别并分配给质量管理人员，他们可以最好地交付物有所值并帮助您实现目标. You should ensure to conduct extensive due diligence on asset managers.

Investment advice in action for a large charitable trust

Many of our clients want to spend more time on their core charitable purpose. However, they recognise that this requires financial success in their investment portfolios. This can be a challenge in terms of time, resources and expertise.(1)

One large charitable trust we worked with wanted to build a longer-term strategy, incorporating sustainability and the ability to fund the grants at the core of the trust’s mission. 该信托基金的投资没有很好地分散，而且面临资产价格下跌带来的潜在重大风险.

Meanwhile, the trustee board needed to manage the operational aspects of its investments, however its in-house team didn’t have the resources and expertise to do so.

We worked with the trustee board to design a strategy to support a consistent level of grants each year, while seeking to retain the real value of trust assets over the long term. Together, we implemented a robust, diversified and ESG-aware investment strategy, helping reduce risk and position the fund to access potential opportunities.

We then implemented the strategy on behalf of our client through a range of highly-rated asset managers(2) that were reviewed and assessed by our global research team. 我们帮助他们在不需要额外的内部业务资源的情况下有效地获得私人市场机会. The client now makes investment decisions based on better reporting and transparency around their portfolio. By working as an extension of their team, we provide our client with the opportunity to focus on other priorities for their mission.

Key benefits for the client:

  • Improved governance structure

  • Asset managers and strategies

  • Integration of ESG considerations

  • Reduced investment costs and risks

Common questions from endowment and foundation investors

我们可以通过专注于对任何投资策略都至关重要的三个关键领域，帮助您提高获得更好投资回报的可能性.

  1. Portfolio mix检讨你的策略性资产配置，并整合另类资产类别，例如有助于提供强劲回报的私人市场机会.(3)
  2. Improved governance定义并开发一个强大的治理结构，该结构旨在帮助您做出更明智的决策并有效地实现它们.  
  3. Managing costs: Costs can significantly impact outcomes and are a critical factor. Our scale enables us to reduce both your explicit and implicit costs.

Implementation services, sometimes referred to as OCIO or fiduciary management, provide you with the expertise of a specialised investment firm to help you manage your investments. 您可以使用这些服务来帮助您就资产配置和资产管理公司选择等关键主题制定和执行投资决策，或者您可以让OCIO代表您做出决策.

We have extensive implementation experience and can execute investment decisions quickly, efficiently and in a risk-controlled manner on your behalf. 与我们合作意味着您可以利用我们的专业知识和运营经验，并获得一个了解您的组织和需求的专业团队. We strive to deliver economies of scale, quality asset managers and potentially lower costs.

Private market investments such as infrastructure, private equity, 私人债务和房地产都可以为你提供重要的潜在回报和收入来源，而这些与公开股票和债券市场的相关性较小. 

However, accessing these opportunities is not as easy. Looking for an investment partner with scale, experience, and strong relationships with high quality managers around the world.

Extensive monitoring, reporting and engagement is critical to a successful review process of an asset manager. Having a solid understanding of the asset manager’s strategy, approach and specific exposures allows you to make better decisions.

我们对数千家资产管理公司和策略进行了广泛的研究，并通过我们的 MercerInsight® research platform, through our advice and it's integrated into the solutions we deliver clients.

Although it’s extremely difficult to predict where the next economic shock will come from, it’s important that your portfolio is well diversified and that this is tested on a regular basis.  

Diversification is achieved through a mix of asset managers, asset classes and exposures, and drivers of return. Most endowments, 基金会和慈善投资者非常适合投资流动性较差的资产类别，这有助于减少投资组合的波动性.

我们可以帮助您建立多元化的投资组合和战略性资产配置，为未来做好准备，并使您能够利用可能出现的中短期机会.(4)

We have decades of experience helping clients across the globe integrate sustainability into their portfolios. This includes ESG, impact investing and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategies. We can help you construct a portfolio and strategy to support your organisation’s wider goals.

我们可以与您一起制定符合您要求的政策和原则，我们将与您一起确保这些政策和原则得到执行, monitored and developed over time.

We can help you develop and execute a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy and process within your investment portfolios. We provide advice on KPIs and a framework to monitor these KPIs for all of the managers within your portfolio. We place a high value on diversity and inclusion when monitoring and selecting asset managers.

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Investment solutions to suit your needs

  • Implementation and Investment Solutions

    We can help you define, develop and implement your investment strategy by addressing areas such as governance, risk, sustainability and diversification. We flex our services to suit your needs and help you achieve your investment goals.

  • Sustainable investments 

    We help you build a sustainable investment strategy that integrates environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) factors and seeks an optimal mix between positive change and favourable returns.

  • Alternative investments

    Leveraging our existing relationships with hundreds of asset managers around the world, we can help you identify and source new investment strategies, opportunities, ideas and innovations across private markets and hedge funds. 

  • Strategic research 

    Become a member of the MercerInsight® Community today to get access to strategic research from hundreds of thought leaders around the world, including Mercer and third-party publishers. It’s complimentary and easy to join.

  • Asset manager research 

    By subscribing to MercerInsight®, an alliance with eVestment, you can gain access to data, 分析和我们对资产管理公司的前瞻性研究，以及公共和私人市场上数千种投资策略. 

  • Managing investment risk

    我们的美世哨兵团队可以帮助您进行尽职调查，降低您的投资组合和战略中的运营风险. We assess asset managers, custodians and other service providers to help you deliver on your governance objectives.

Leverage our breadth and depth

$16.2T

US $16.2 trillion in global assets under advisement1

$492Bn

US $492 billion in global assets under management2

11K+

More than 11,900 investment strategies rated3

3K+

More than 3,000 asset managers rated4

* 1 June 30, 2023,  2 June 30, 2024,  3 March 31, 2024,  4 March 31, 2024
我们相信，我们庞大的规模和资源丰富的团队最适合帮助您了解金融市场, construct an appropriate investment portfolio, and set out a long-term, sustainable strategy aligned with your organisation’s goals and mission.

Related insights

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    *ESG investing refers to environmental, social, and governance considerations that may have a material impact on financial performance, and therefore are taken into account, alongside other economic and financial metrics, in assessing the risk and return potential of an investment. Thematic investing involves investing with a goal, at least in part, to achieve an impact on an environmental, social, or governance issue, alongside generating return and mitigating risk. As always, the decision whether to invest in ESG-themed options, like all options, 是否必须遵循审慎的程序，以促进计划及其参与者的财务利益.

    **Fee savings cannot be guaranteed.

    1. All case studies included in this presentation are for illustrative purposes only. Please note that the case study included is based on a real-life scenario, 但所有的身份信息都是匿名的，以保护当事人的隐私和机密性. 本案例研究的目的是提供对所提供的服务和所取得的成果的一般理解. The results mentioned in this case study may not be typical and may vary depending on individual circumstances. This case study should not be considered as legal advice or a guarantee of similar results.
    2. Please see the Guide to Mercer's Investment Strategy Ratings
    3. Mercer cannot guarantee access to opportunities. Access is at the discretion of the investment manager.
    4. Diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss.