This is an interview with Tanweer Khan – Founder & CEO, Causee
Can you tell us more about your background and your journey from investment banker, to politician, to philanthropist?
My career began in investment banking, where I spent more than three decades working across some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including senior roles at Standard Chartered, UBS, UniCredit and JPMorgan Chase. It was a career spent watching enormous sums of money move around the globe every single day.
I come from a very working-class background; my father was a labourer in the cotton mills of Lancashire, so despite ending up in investment banking, I have always been involved in supporting charity/community work and giving back to society. So, it was a natural step for me to serve the local community as a councillor.
Politics gave me a very different perspective. As a councillor, you see first-hand the pressures facing ordinary families, communities and voluntary organisations. You also realise that many of society’s problems cannot simply be solved by government alone.
What connects all three chapters – banking, politics and now philanthropy – is really one question: how value moves through a system, and who it actually reaches at the end. Causee is where that question finally gets answered on my own terms, rather than someone else’s.
Looking at your banking career, what did you learn about how money moves that changed how you think about charitable giving?
Banking teaches you, better than almost anything else, just how vast the flows of money moving through the world really are – and how little of that movement is ever designed, deliberately, to reach the people who need it most. Charitable giving usually sits outside the transaction entirely: it’s the thing you do afterwards, with what’s left over, if you remember to.
What became evident to me was that, on the whole, people are willing to help charities and good causes, but the traditional giving model requires people to disrupt their daily routine in order to do so. And that is where I started thinking about how one could use the power of the internet to reinvent a business model that didn’t require any extra effort or decision in order to make social impact.
That’s really the insight behind Causee: instead of treating giving as a deduction at the end of the process, we’ve tried to build it into the transaction itself. Every sale on the platform is designed to route value towards a charitable cause automatically, not as an afterthought that depends on someone’s goodwill on any given day.
Tell us about the philosophy behind Causee and why you set it up?
Commerce creates value every single day, at enormous scale – and yet only a tiny fraction of that value is ever deliberately directed towards social good. Causee exists to change that ratio, not through charity bolted onto a marketplace, but by building an entire marketplace around the idea from day one.
The mechanics are simple by design. Sellers keep 100% of their sale price – there’s no commission eating into what they earn. Buyers pay a small Causee Protection Fee on top of the purchase price, and once our own running costs are covered, 100% of what’s left of Causee’s profit is donated to charity. Nobody has to change their behaviour or make a special trip to a separate donation page. They simply buy and sell the things they were always going to buy and sell – pre-loved fashion, furniture, electronics – and the platform does the rest.
It’s also, quietly, a sustainability story: every item resold does not need to be manufactured again. Purpose and pre-loved commerce turned out to reinforce each other rather naturally.
What differentiates Causee from other businesses is that some of them will jump on a particular event/conflict/disaster bandwagon and say that they are donating X% of their profits to that particular cause. Whilst noble, that sits uneasily with me – because if a company is donating, say 10% of profits to refugees in a conflict zone, by design they are keeping 90% of profit precisely because that conflict exists in the first place. That just is not principled in my view.
The Causee model is designed differently; 100% of our profits are distributed to charities and good causes.
You talk about the importance of purpose-led commerce. What do you think the retail sector needs to do to embrace this?
The retail sector treats purpose as a marketing layer and not as an architecture decision. Too much of what gets called “purpose-led” retail is a campaign, a seasonal collection, or a percentage donated during a single awareness week – visible, well-intentioned, and structurally optional. Customers can tell the difference between something a business does and something a business is.
The retailers who will earn genuine trust over the next decade are the ones who build social or environmental value into the default transaction – not an opt-in checkbox at checkout, but the actual mechanics of how the business makes money. That’s a much harder thing to build than a campaign, which is exactly why it’s more convincing when a business actually does it.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing charities at the moment?
Household budgets are tighter than they’ve been in a generation, which puts direct pressure on individuals giving at exactly the moment demand for charitable services is rising. At the same time, running costs for charities themselves have gone up, so the money that does come in needs to stretch further to cover the same work.
There’s also a structural fragility in how a lot of charities fund themselves – heavy reliance on a relatively small pool of major donors, legacies and one-off campaigns, rather than steady, diversified, recurring income. And trust, frankly, has taken some knocks across the sector in recent years, which makes donors more cautious and more demanding of transparency before they’ll commit.
You only have to pick up the daily newsletter from Civil Society every morning to read about yet another charity that is struggling or shutting down.
If you were speaking to every charity CEO tomorrow, what advice do you think they need to hear about the future of fundraising?
Every one of your supporters is already spending money on things they need – clothes, furniture, electronics, gifts. The future of fundraising isn’t a better ask; it’s finding ways to be present inside spending that was always going to happen anyway, rather than competing for a separate, deliberate act of generosity.
Diversify away from campaigns and towards recurring, structural income wherever you can – the charities that will be most resilient over the next decade are the ones that aren’t dependent on remembering to ask at the right moment. And invest in transparency.
Donors, especially younger ones, want to see where the money actually goes before they’ll trust you with more of it. Show your working. An easy way is to partner with companies via payroll giving.
What’s your vision for the future of Causee and ethical consumerism?
I’d like buying and selling pre-loved goods through a marketplace that funds charity to stop being a niche choice and just become the obvious, default way people shop – no different in effort from using any other marketplace, but with a very different outcome for where the money goes.
I want Causee to become a platform, a community and, eventually, an economic ecosystem built around the idea that commercial activity and social impact do not have to sit in separate boxes. In years to come, I would like to see Causee donating tens of millions of pounds each year to charities.
Ultimately, I want the Causee name itself to mean something. There are brands where you instantly understand the proposition behind the name. My ambition is that when people eventually hear “Causee”, they think this is a business that helps society.