As an investment consultancy, Innovest’s role is to perform due diligence on the managers, products, and strategies that our clients use. Ultimately, our comprehensive qualitative and quantitative approach determines if past performance is luck or skill and if it is repeatable in the future.
Many of our faith-based clients also care about the make-up of their portfolio, wanting to ensure that exposure to abortion, pornography, child labor, and other objectionable investments are screened out from the portfolio.
Plenty of money management firms are willing to manage a religiously screened portfolio. However, many of these firms uphold values that are misaligned with those of these faith-based organization clients.
In our due diligence process, we ask key questions to help us understand if money management firms have values that clash with the principles of the Church. We make the following requests:
The answers to these questions can be quite revealing. In fact, many money management organizations promote their “woke” practices publicly.
Most, if not all, investment consultants managing money for faith-based organizations fail to ask the questions that we have outlined. This is partly because investment consultants struggle themselves to provide answers that align with the values of their faith-based clients. We highly recommend that these questions be asked of all your service providers.
The world is changing. There are noted instances where service providers have “cancelled” faith-based organizations. Money management and investment consultants happily collect fees and commissions from the religious space. Perhaps it is time to look closely at the values of these firms.