Insights and Analysis:More Charities Seek Specialist Support Amid Rising Concerns Over High Fees, Poor Transparency and Generic Investment Advice

Date: 7 April 2026

For years, Cartwright has supported trusts within the pensions sector. They saw a gap in the market for those struggling with opaque fees and one-size-fits-all models. Through this experience, they saw how their unique skill-set could benefit other industries and branched into new sectors, to offer the same bespoke expertise usually reserved for larger trusts. Now the firm is increasingly seeing the same issues replicated across the charity sector.

Bespoke, transparent support

“We keep coming across charities who are underserved and overcharged,” said Martin Mercer, Head of Charitable Trusts at Cartwright. “They’re unrestricted reserves are being put into models designed for someone else or nobody in particular and paying far more than they should for it too. After decades of solving this problem for mid-market pension schemes, we know how to deliver the bespoke, transparent support these charities are missing.”

Mercer saw the similarities in charities and their current market within pension schemes and knew that Cartwright could disrupt the market in the same way as it did 40 years ago for pensions. Since launching its brand extension in late 2024, Cartwright Charitable Trusts have already begun to prove this. Feedback from a number of charities being; patterns of unclear fees hiding within complex structures, “Charity focused” funds that don’t reflect actual risk appetite, lack of forward looking modelling or scenario analysis and off-the-shelf strategies more suited to the retail market.

Client case studies

Two recent Cartwright clients proved how costly these issues are. Hyde Charitable Trust (HCT), part of one of the largest and most diverse housing and community services providers in the country believed their current fees to be roughly 0.7% per year but Cartwright’s investigation found this to be almost double. A portfolio review and restructuring, along with access to best-in-class institutional funds allowed the charity, to optimise its investment strategy while cutting management fees by around 60%.

Whilst the other, Citizens Advice Haringey, went from near zero cash returns for their unrestricted reserves held in multiple cash accounts, to expected annual long-term returns of around 9% per annum. The investment strategy provides a hedge against inflation, helping preserve their purchasing power and its implementation gave them a regularly monitored portfolio aligned with their charity objectives.

Though Mercer and his team found that high fees were the issue for one and zero returns and no strategy were the issue for the other, both revealed the same underlying problem: charities are not getting the specialist, transparent advice they deserve.

Challenging the norm

We are pioneering to challenge an investment market dominated by standardised solutions. With major investment providers dominating much of the charity advisory landscape, many organisations have come to accept the fees, generic strategies and basic reporting as the norm. Cartwright Charitable Trusts is pushing back. And charities are listening. A recent charity client commented that Cartwright “understood our needs and were able to offer a fresh approach that created a material saving in management costs and optimised our investment strategy.”

“Whatever their size, charities shouldn’t be accepting standardised solutions hidden behind unclear pricing” comments Martin. “Whether they choose to use our expertise or another investment consultancy, the fact is that they deserve expert modelling, complete transparency and advice that starts with their mission not with a template.”

Sources