About Augustine
+10,000
Companies Covered
7
Investment Strategies
1
Common Purpose
Helping Catholic Organizations Achieve Excellent Financial Stewardship
Augustine Catholic Socially Responsible Investing began with a vision shared by Greg Estes and Jeff Bernardo. Already serving the investment needs of high net worth individuals, families, and institutions through Augustine Asset Management, they believed that they could apply their skills and experience to help Catholic institutions implement best investment practices.
They saw the twofold challenge that Catholic institutions face in upholding Catholic teaching across their investment portfolios without forgoing long-term risk-adjusted returns that allow for growth in financial assets. In addition, many Catholic organizations sought advice on how to implement more efficient operational structures for governance of investment assets. Seeing these needs, Augustine Catholic Socially Responsible Investing was launched in 2017. The team at Augustine stands ready to help all Catholic organizations achieve their goals of excellent financial stewardship.
Holistic Advice
When needed, Augustine is able to offer advice on a range of issues for Catholic institutions, including but not limited to advice on: a written Investment Policy Statement; where to custody assets; setup of stock donation accounts; asset allocation advice; and any other operational issue that is related to the investment function. With Augustine, you control how much you wish to use our services: from simply plugging one or more of our investment strategies to fit specific investment needs, to working with you as your sole investment advisor. We can fulfill many levels of service requirements. As fiduciaries, we take seriously our mandate to provide advice that is in your best interest.
Developed Exclusively for Catholic Institutions
The backbone of Augustine’s investment offerings is its proprietary Catholic SRI process, which is based upon the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines. This process applies across Augustine Catholic Investment Strategies (ACIS), which includes two actively managed fixed income strategies, one actively managed global equity index strategy, and four optimized domestic equity indexing strategies. All strategies are separately managed accounts, which means that you directly own all securities within the strategy (no mutual funds). This allows for direct oversight for your investment committee. All Augustine strategies are managed directly in-house; we do not use sub-advisors.
All investment management fees are clearly stated up front and at institutional rates — not at retail levels. Further, our investment reporting is clear, detailed, and includes time-weighted rate of return performance, which shows rates of return for multiple trailing year periods as well as since inception returns and which are benchmarked to index returns.
