July 12, 2025 • 11 mins
Guest: Chris Cuffe
Original air date: November 12, 2024
Original description: Chris Cuffe AO is one of the most well-known investors in Australia, having led large companies and funds during a stellar career. But he's also one of our most prominent philanthropists.
Chris speaks to Sean Aylmer about how Third Link Investment Managers has donated almost $22m in fees to charity, and why he was inspired to set up Australian Philanthropic Services.
Find out more: https://fearandgreed.com.au
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Fear and Greed Sunday feature. I'm Sean Aylmer.
Chris cuff is a bit of a legend in funds management.
He's one of the most well known investors in Australia,
having led large companies and funds during a stellar career.
More recently, he's turned into one of our most prominent philanthropists.
In this feature, Chris speaks to me about how Third
(00:21):
Link Investment Managers has donated almost twenty two million dollars
in fees to charity and why he was inspired to
set up Australian philanthropic Services. I hope you enjoyed the chat,
Chris cuff Io, Welcome to Fear and Greed and thank you.
(00:43):
Why have you become so philanthropic? And perhaps you've always
been philanthropic, but this seems to be your big motivation nowadays.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Look, I think I probably always was.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I suspect a lot of people are, but they don't
always have the time with the means. But I certainly
became a little more famous at a point in time
than I wanted to be.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I'd rather have stayed nice in private, but that wasn't
the case.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So I thought, well, I might as well use this
fame and see if I can do a bit of
good with it. So I've done a number of things
over the years to try and combine investment with philanthropy.
So use my base skills to increase philanthropy in Australia.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And I don't really want to go into history, but
you've got good press and bad press at different times
in your career, and you were a really well known
fund manager. I have heard you speak before and you
just said at one point and you kind of were
a bit jack of the whole lot because you didn't
want a profile, but kind of at one point you thought, actually,
if I'm going to have a profile and I'm stuck
with it, why don't I use it. Isn't that the story?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, that's pretty much the story. And the bad press
was wrong press, it was missreported. But as time went on,
people found out the truth and I think that's allowed
me to open a lot of doors and do a
lot of things. So I I really have just turned
that into a useful profile in helping charity. So the
(02:09):
first one of those was, as you mentioned in the intro,
Third Link Growth Fund, was that the fund I put
together an Australian equity fund of funds where I wanted
to give investors in the fund, so it was promoted
to the public. It's currently about one hundred and seventy
million dollars in size. It's an Australian equities investment that
(02:33):
anyone can go into. It's a retail product and the
underlying fund managers I use because it's a fund of funds,
they've all agreed to work for no fee and up
the top of that my fund charge is a fee,
but that fee all goes to charity.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Okay, so that twenty two million dollars of how many
years and where does the money go to? How do
you pick your charities?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, I've been.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Running the fun for about sixteen years.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It started small. It's a reasonable.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Size now so that currently peels off about giveaway around
about one point seven million.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Dollars a year.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I choose the charities based on sometimes it's a theme.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
For many years, it's been.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Helping kids who've not had a grade lot in life.
It might be Indigenous kids who might be unemployed, and
might kids suffering mental health, but also help other organizations.
Gratton Institute has been a favorite. The Ethics Institute, but
quite a few. They're all shown on the website as
(03:35):
a comprehensive website for Third Link Growth Fun and shows
all the charities supported over the years. They tend to
be small to medium sized charities who really need the funding.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, okay, Estraining philanthropic Services then that came first. Though
why did you set that one up? At?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Well?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
How does it work? I think I know why he
set it up, but how does it work?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Australian Film and the Tropic Services actually came slightly after
Third Link Growth Fund, but they were similar. But I
had a view that there was a particular type of
filmanosthropic vehicle called an ancillary fund, private ancillary fund or
public ancillary fund that people who wanted to give money
away could utilize and give money away, perhaps more efficiently
(04:21):
and effectively. But they were pretty much unknown as an
unknown piece of law tax law. And I set up
a private ancillary fund myself in two thousand and seven
I think it was, and it was a pretty clunky.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Horrible experience. So I thought, well, set.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Up an organization that would be a charity itself, but
the organization would focus on helping philanthropists people with who
wanted to give money away. Help the philanthropists set up
better structures and give perhaps give more away over time,
and roll the clock forward twelve year, thirteen years. We
(05:01):
now administer and these ancillary funds for just on one
thousand clients we have. We look after about two point
three billion dollars on behalf of those clients, and they
give away around one hundred and sixty million dollars a
year and increasing.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So the things working well.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
It's working really well, and it's not philanthropists.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Sounds like something for the rich. It's not always the rich.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Some people have got a lot of money, but others
can start these structures with as little as fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Say with me, Chris, We'll be back in a minute.
I'm speaking to Chris cuff Ao.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Miniestra.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Compared to the US, at least Australia doesn't have that
history of philanthropy. At one point is to put the
BTW Rich List together, and I remember Dick Smith being
very upset at the time because he said you should
actually have a list of philanthropists. The thing is most
people didn't want to tell us. Most people don't want
to say how much money they're giving away. Is that
a good or a bad thing? How do we encourage
(06:05):
an environment of philanthropy.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Well, I don't know whether it's good or bad that
if you want to talk about it a lot. I
think certainly in the US as a culture of you know,
you talk about which foundations you might support.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
The US was you.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Know a lot of the big charitable foundations of fancy
names that have been there for decades and decades and decades.
The Ford Foundation as an example, or the Gates Foundation.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
These are big things.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
People like talking about those things in America because they've
grown up with it. But I think wealth in Australia
is still relatively new. These structures I'm talking about ancillary funds,
they haven't been around that long and they are a
much better way I believe to give and it's really
not being well known amongst.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Wealth advisors or the wealth.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
So that's part of my rationale to set up Australian
film thropics and get the word out there. I mean
we're from a fairly you know, we started with nothing.
We're now the biggest charitable player in Australia and setting
these things up and administering them. And we've really only
just got started, so I'm confident the future will see
(07:15):
a lot more philanthropy in Australia.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
How do you bring some of the stuff that we've
been reading about? You said ASEX listed companies who invest
in AX listed companies in the first energy. We hear
lots about corporate culture. There's some really high profile examples
at the moment running through the media without commenting on
them specifically. How do you kind of choose your companies?
(07:40):
How do you think about stuff like corporate culture, like
the renewable energy shift, those kind of mega themes. Sometimes
I wonder do they matter or not? Is it just
all about getting the more money you make for charity
the better?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Well?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
I mentioned that within the fund I run third Link
Growth Funded Again, which is an Australian equity fund, I
use underlying investment managers, So I'm not selecting stocks directly myself,
but the fund managers I select, which by the way,
are based on merit and years of me being in
this industry and thinking I have some idea of who
(08:17):
does a good job. They in turn price all those
things so they take into account things to do with
the ESG, governance, the environment, society, governance. They take into
account those things when they price the stock or climate
change or so that's just part of the process.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Okay, what would you like to achieve? Do you have
a goal in terms of how many philanthropists, how much
money something or other? A goalpast that in five or
ten years you could sort of walk away from it
and say, hey, this is what we did well.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
It's interesting question with Thirdly in Growth fund. To start with,
I want to achieve a really great investment for investors.
So that is one of the few funds in Australia
that's actually beaten the All Ordinaries Index, the Big Index
over the life of the fund. Hardly any fund managers
do that. So I'm giving people a very good investment
(09:15):
to begin with. If I can keep giving away a
couple of million dollars a year to charities, I will
do that for as long as I'm cognitively able, and
the underlying fund managers are happy to keep doing it,
and I think they are really pressed with it. I mean,
it's great to be able to give a couple of
million dollars years like a community that we're all enjoying
(09:36):
being part of. Frustrating philanthropic services that that organization. That
my goal there is that these ancillary funds become as
popular as for wealth advisors, as talking about self many
superfunds or superannuation in general, that it becomes into the
very common vernacular to talk about philanthropy as part of
(09:59):
a person financial planning needs. And the third organization we
haven't mentioned. I share a listed company called Hearts and
Minds Investments Limited. This is on the Australian Stock Exchange
ticker HM one, and that gives away a percent and
a half of its assets a year to medical research
(10:20):
in Australia. So we're now giving away very significant amounts
of money. I think we're up to about sixty million
dollars to medical research.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
That's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
The common theme with all these things that I'm involved
with is there's a fair investment side to each of
these activities as well, and that's what I enjoy. I
can use the base skill and help society and hopefully
through the things I do that we become one of
the bigger contributors to the charitable world.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Chris, thank you for talking to Hear and Greed.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
That was Chris caff Ao, chairman and founder of Australian
philanthropic services and the founding director and portfolio manager of
Third Link Growth Fund. Of course, if you're making investments,
always seek your own personal advice. We are not an
investment podcast. This is the Fear and Greed Business Interview.
Join us every morning for the full episode of Fear
and Greed Business Years for people who make their own decisions.
(11:17):
I'm Sean Almer. Enjoy your day.
Welcome to Fear and Greed Sunday feature. I'm Sean Aylmer.
Chris cuff is a bit of a legend in funds management.
He's one of the most well known investors in Australia,
having led large companies and funds during a stellar career.
More recently, he's turned into one of our most prominent philanthropists.
In this feature, Chris speaks to me about how Third
(00:21):
Link Investment Managers has donated almost twenty two million dollars
in fees to charity and why he was inspired to
set up Australian philanthropic Services. I hope you enjoyed the chat,
Chris cuff Io, Welcome to Fear and Greed and thank you.
(00:43):
Why have you become so philanthropic? And perhaps you've always
been philanthropic, but this seems to be your big motivation nowadays.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Look, I think I probably always was.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I suspect a lot of people are, but they don't
always have the time with the means. But I certainly
became a little more famous at a point in time
than I wanted to be.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I'd rather have stayed nice in private, but that wasn't
the case.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So I thought, well, I might as well use this
fame and see if I can do a bit of
good with it. So I've done a number of things
over the years to try and combine investment with philanthropy.
So use my base skills to increase philanthropy in Australia.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And I don't really want to go into history, but
you've got good press and bad press at different times
in your career, and you were a really well known
fund manager. I have heard you speak before and you
just said at one point and you kind of were
a bit jack of the whole lot because you didn't
want a profile, but kind of at one point you thought, actually,
if I'm going to have a profile and I'm stuck
with it, why don't I use it. Isn't that the story?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, that's pretty much the story. And the bad press
was wrong press, it was missreported. But as time went on,
people found out the truth and I think that's allowed
me to open a lot of doors and do a
lot of things. So I I really have just turned
that into a useful profile in helping charity. So the
(02:09):
first one of those was, as you mentioned in the intro,
Third Link Growth Fund, was that the fund I put
together an Australian equity fund of funds where I wanted
to give investors in the fund, so it was promoted
to the public. It's currently about one hundred and seventy
million dollars in size. It's an Australian equities investment that
(02:33):
anyone can go into. It's a retail product and the
underlying fund managers I use because it's a fund of funds,
they've all agreed to work for no fee and up
the top of that my fund charge is a fee,
but that fee all goes to charity.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Okay, so that twenty two million dollars of how many
years and where does the money go to? How do
you pick your charities?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, I've been.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Running the fun for about sixteen years.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It started small. It's a reasonable.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Size now so that currently peels off about giveaway around
about one point seven million.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Dollars a year.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I choose the charities based on sometimes it's a theme.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
For many years, it's been.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Helping kids who've not had a grade lot in life.
It might be Indigenous kids who might be unemployed, and
might kids suffering mental health, but also help other organizations.
Gratton Institute has been a favorite. The Ethics Institute, but
quite a few. They're all shown on the website as
(03:35):
a comprehensive website for Third Link Growth Fun and shows
all the charities supported over the years. They tend to
be small to medium sized charities who really need the funding.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, okay, Estraining philanthropic Services then that came first. Though
why did you set that one up? At?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Well?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
How does it work? I think I know why he
set it up, but how does it work?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Australian Film and the Tropic Services actually came slightly after
Third Link Growth Fund, but they were similar. But I
had a view that there was a particular type of
filmanosthropic vehicle called an ancillary fund, private ancillary fund or
public ancillary fund that people who wanted to give money
away could utilize and give money away, perhaps more efficiently
(04:21):
and effectively. But they were pretty much unknown as an
unknown piece of law tax law. And I set up
a private ancillary fund myself in two thousand and seven
I think it was, and it was a pretty clunky.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Horrible experience. So I thought, well, set.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Up an organization that would be a charity itself, but
the organization would focus on helping philanthropists people with who
wanted to give money away. Help the philanthropists set up
better structures and give perhaps give more away over time,
and roll the clock forward twelve year, thirteen years. We
(05:01):
now administer and these ancillary funds for just on one
thousand clients we have. We look after about two point
three billion dollars on behalf of those clients, and they
give away around one hundred and sixty million dollars a
year and increasing.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So the things working well.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
It's working really well, and it's not philanthropists.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Sounds like something for the rich. It's not always the rich.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Some people have got a lot of money, but others
can start these structures with as little as fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Say with me, Chris, We'll be back in a minute.
I'm speaking to Chris cuff Ao.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Miniestra.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Compared to the US, at least Australia doesn't have that
history of philanthropy. At one point is to put the
BTW Rich List together, and I remember Dick Smith being
very upset at the time because he said you should
actually have a list of philanthropists. The thing is most
people didn't want to tell us. Most people don't want
to say how much money they're giving away. Is that
a good or a bad thing? How do we encourage
(06:05):
an environment of philanthropy.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Well, I don't know whether it's good or bad that
if you want to talk about it a lot. I
think certainly in the US as a culture of you know,
you talk about which foundations you might support.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
The US was you.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Know a lot of the big charitable foundations of fancy
names that have been there for decades and decades and decades.
The Ford Foundation as an example, or the Gates Foundation.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
These are big things.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
People like talking about those things in America because they've
grown up with it. But I think wealth in Australia
is still relatively new. These structures I'm talking about ancillary funds,
they haven't been around that long and they are a
much better way I believe to give and it's really
not being well known amongst.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Wealth advisors or the wealth.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
So that's part of my rationale to set up Australian
film thropics and get the word out there. I mean
we're from a fairly you know, we started with nothing.
We're now the biggest charitable player in Australia and setting
these things up and administering them. And we've really only
just got started, so I'm confident the future will see
(07:15):
a lot more philanthropy in Australia.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
How do you bring some of the stuff that we've
been reading about? You said ASEX listed companies who invest
in AX listed companies in the first energy. We hear
lots about corporate culture. There's some really high profile examples
at the moment running through the media without commenting on
them specifically. How do you kind of choose your companies?
(07:40):
How do you think about stuff like corporate culture, like
the renewable energy shift, those kind of mega themes. Sometimes
I wonder do they matter or not? Is it just
all about getting the more money you make for charity
the better?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Well?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
I mentioned that within the fund I run third Link
Growth Funded Again, which is an Australian equity fund, I
use underlying investment managers, So I'm not selecting stocks directly myself,
but the fund managers I select, which by the way,
are based on merit and years of me being in
this industry and thinking I have some idea of who
(08:17):
does a good job. They in turn price all those
things so they take into account things to do with
the ESG, governance, the environment, society, governance. They take into
account those things when they price the stock or climate
change or so that's just part of the process.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Okay, what would you like to achieve? Do you have
a goal in terms of how many philanthropists, how much
money something or other? A goalpast that in five or
ten years you could sort of walk away from it
and say, hey, this is what we did well.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
It's interesting question with Thirdly in Growth fund. To start with,
I want to achieve a really great investment for investors.
So that is one of the few funds in Australia
that's actually beaten the All Ordinaries Index, the Big Index
over the life of the fund. Hardly any fund managers
do that. So I'm giving people a very good investment
(09:15):
to begin with. If I can keep giving away a
couple of million dollars a year to charities, I will
do that for as long as I'm cognitively able, and
the underlying fund managers are happy to keep doing it,
and I think they are really pressed with it. I mean,
it's great to be able to give a couple of
million dollars years like a community that we're all enjoying
(09:36):
being part of. Frustrating philanthropic services that that organization. That
my goal there is that these ancillary funds become as
popular as for wealth advisors, as talking about self many
superfunds or superannuation in general, that it becomes into the
very common vernacular to talk about philanthropy as part of
(09:59):
a person financial planning needs. And the third organization we
haven't mentioned. I share a listed company called Hearts and
Minds Investments Limited. This is on the Australian Stock Exchange
ticker HM one, and that gives away a percent and
a half of its assets a year to medical research
(10:20):
in Australia. So we're now giving away very significant amounts
of money. I think we're up to about sixty million
dollars to medical research.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
That's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
The common theme with all these things that I'm involved
with is there's a fair investment side to each of
these activities as well, and that's what I enjoy. I
can use the base skill and help society and hopefully
through the things I do that we become one of
the bigger contributors to the charitable world.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Chris, thank you for talking to Hear and Greed.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
That was Chris caff Ao, chairman and founder of Australian
philanthropic services and the founding director and portfolio manager of
Third Link Growth Fund. Of course, if you're making investments,
always seek your own personal advice. We are not an
investment podcast. This is the Fear and Greed Business Interview.
Join us every morning for the full episode of Fear
and Greed Business Years for people who make their own decisions.
(11:17):
I'm Sean Almer. Enjoy your day.
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