UNJSPF Global Townhall

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all of our Fund clients. Joining us from around the world today, we would like to welcome you to the 2026 UNJSBF Global Town Hall. My name is Pauline Batista, I work in the communications team of the Fund and I will be moderating our session today. This Town hall is being held virtually and will run from 10 to 11am New York time. Now, before we begin, there's a few important housekeeping notes that I'd like to share with you. Interpretation is available in English and French. You may select your preferred language on your screen. The session is being recorded and the video will be posted on the UNWeb TV and on UNJSPF on the UNJSPF website. Many of you submitted questions in advance. We thank you very much. Today we will cover most of your recurring questions through the slide presentation and we reserved a few other recurring ones for each one of our presenters in the end during our Q and A session. As always, if you have personal questions, we invite you to reach out to us directly through the Contact US page on unjspf.org Today we are grateful to be joined by Rosemary McLean, who is the Chief Executive of Pension Administration, and Robert Van Der Zee, the representative of the Secretary General for the investment of the UNJSPF assets. Together they will walk us through the Fund's financial health, performance, modernization and the Fund's future. Rosemarie, the floor is yours.

Thank you Pauline and greetings to all of you. Wherever you may be in the world. It's a pleasure to be with you again. Let me start by saying that this pension fund is secure. It is a strong pension fund. Our actuarial valuations and asset liability management studies show us that the fund is financially strong and secure. And while participant numbers have declined in the past year, it's important to note that they have a limited impact on the Fund's solvency. At the same time, the Fund is modernizing its systems and its processes and tools to deliver excellent service to our plan participants and and retirees. Being transparent, clear and timely in all of our communication is a key priority. Speaking more specifically on the fund solvency, the actuarial valuation, which is conducted by a third party actuarial firm, assesses whether the current contribution rate, which is 23.7% of pensionable remuneration and the 23.7 is comprised of 7.9% from your salary and 15.8% from your employer. So the actuarial evaluation is done to assess ensure that all benefits to current and future participants can be paid into perpetuity. We're actually in the midst of doing another actuarial valuation and it will be made available to the Board in July. So the goal here is for the actuarial evaluation to be in that 2% corridor and you can see that we have been consistently there for the last 20 years. And just a reminder that this is a defined benefit plan. So what does that mean? It means that your benefit is based on on a formula, a predetermined formula which takes into consideration your age, your years of contribution, your salary grade, and it's important to note that it's adjusted based on inflation. In 2026, the cost of living adjustment was 2.7% paid in April of this year. We had a number of questions about the the UNGA request for Holistic Review of the pension scheme. So that occurred in Resolution 80243 which passed at the end of last year and it asked the pension board to conduct a holistic review of the pension scheme. So this review is expected to go for three years with recommendations to be submitted to the General assembly in 2028. For more updates on this issue, please check out our website where we will be posting regular updates after board meetings. Reflecting back on 2025, it was a record breaking year for us in pension administration. We had over 22,000 benefits processed. That's an increase of 58% versus 2024, a really a record volume. And I'm really pleased to report that 95.5% were processed within 15 business days. We had over 114,000 client inquiries handled with an average response time of 2.5 business days. And if you have any occasion to contact us, our wait time in the call center is currently 15 seconds. Part of the reason why we could so successfully absorb a 58% increase in volume of work is because of the investments we've made in the last few years in modernizing the pension fund under our care strategy. So I'll just share a few examples, one of them being our UNJSPF Kids Connect, which is a customer relationship management system that allows us to manage cases and respond to inquiries faster. We also have an automated separation process, the PF4, where information can come to us from member organizations and electronically which speeds up the separation to first payment timeline. We have multi factor authentication in our member self service portal which contributes to stronger protection of your personal data. We've also significantly invested in cleaning up some of our historical data. For example, over 129,000 dependent records were cleaned up. This allows us to process inquiries Faster and I welcome you to go to the member self service portal and look at your dependent records and make sure that they are accurate. We have automation and E forms which again contribute to less paperwork and fewer manual steps. And finally our digital certificate of entitlement for our retirees to provide us with their annual requirement of a secure proof of life. We are now up to over 60% of our eligible retirees using this channel and in fact over a 90% adoption rate for new retirees. Some of our upcoming new enhancements which we expect to be delivered in mid May, include a new member self service portal where you'll be able to submit requests and also track your cases online. We'll have an E pension very excited about this capability of being able to submit requirements online and see your banking details all in one step we'll have new pension forms. We have invested significantly in making our forms easier to understand, simpler to follow and we're convinced that this will reduce the number of follow up inquiries. And finally we're experimenting with AI in client services. We have an AI tool which we use to respond to inquiries from plan participants who forgot their user ID. And we're finding that AI can handle about 250 of those kinds of inquiries a week, which allows us to better deploy our very talented and highly trained staff in working on more complex work. We've also invested significantly in our outreach and engagement. Last year we did a record number of Town Hall Sessions, 33 Global Town hall sessions in both English and French. We had 42,000 visitors, 17,000 live and another 25,000 viewed the global town hall afterwards. Our list website Traffic is up 14% over 2 million inquiries in 2025. Social media is also up 41% and we're receiving very good feedback from our clients as from the survey who tell us that we are meeting their needs and responding to their requests on a timely basis. So if you're wondering how do I contact the fund? If I have a question, I would encourage you to go to our website. In the top right corner there shows how to contact the fund and on the right you'll see that there are various channels available to you to respond to us. Either online phone, you can come and see us in person, submit documents. It's worth noting that if you do call us, there are toll free numbers available in 673 countries around the world and we are open 24 hours a day, five days a week. So we're covering off every time zone. So just in summary, I just want to reinforce how secure this fund is that we continue to invest in modernizing and improving your service experience. We will continue to ensure that our communication is transparent, clear and open. And I would really encourage you to stay informed about your pension benefits and it's an important employee benefit and it's never too early to know more about your pension. There's a lot of information available to you on our member self service portal as well as on our website. So with that I will turn it over to Robert Van Der Zee for an update on the Office of of Investment Management.

Robert thank you Rosemary. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are. As a client of the UN Joint Pension Fund, thank you for taking the time to be with us this morning. We live in interesting uncertain times that impacts financial markets, that impact the UN system, that may impact your personal and professional lives. So this is an important occasion for us to share with you how we manage the investments of the fund. Today I would like to update you on the Office of Investment Management, the policy framework for investments of the assets of the fund, the medium and long term investment performance, the impact of the Middle east conflict at the moment on the investments. That was actually a question that came through by many of you. The measures that we are taking to protect and grow the fund's assets responsibly over long term. Let me be clear to reaffirm upfront that our mandate remains unchanged to protect and safeguard the assets of the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund, which means for us investing with discipline, prudence and long term perspective. The Secretary General has delegated the fiduciary responsibility and authority for the management and investment of the fund's assets to the representative of the Secretary General who is responsible and accountable for the the investments of the fund. I have the privilege to be appointed by the Secretary General to this position on the 1st of March, and I'm very ably supported by a talented and largely specialized team of 180 staff at the Office of Investment Management. In my position, I've delegated to the Chief Investment Officer the authority to make decisions related to the investments of the assets of the fund, always subject to the following limitations. All investment decisions must be consistent with the investment policy and guidelines that have been established in accordance with the pension fund rules and regulations and all investments must meet the criteria of safety, profitability, liquidity and convertibility. Apart from the Chief Investment Officer, I'm supported by a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and the Chief Finance Office Officer. If we can turn to the first content slide on investments, investments are carried out within the framework of the Investment Policy Statement which is periodically revised. The last time we did that in 2025. This statement outlines the parameters that guide OIM staff Office of Investment Management Staff in managing the investments of the assets of the fund. The Investment Policy Statement specifies the long term and short term investment objectives, the eligible investment universe of asset classes and investment instruments, the strategic asset allocation, the policy benchmark, the risk parameters and the overall investment process. Every four years, as Rosemary mentioned earlier, we perform an asset liability management study to guide us in the management of the fund, the financial solvency, but also guides the investment management of the fund. Preparation for a new ALM study have started and such study will be presented to the pension board in July 2027. The investment framework is designed to support long term decision making and to ensure that the fund can meet its long term obligations. Responsible Investments is an integral part of this framework. It helps us to ensure long term financial sustainability, safeguard the financial security of our beneficiaries and reflect the broader values of the United Nations. If we now turn to the slides in front of you with the last 35 years of development of the assets of the pension fund, you'll see that despite complex global environment marked by geopolitical tensions, market volatility and shifting financial conditions, the fund remains resilient and as of the end of last year had total asset value of US$107.4 billion with a diversified portfolio and a robust liquidity position. It's important to look at this in a long term context as we invest for the long term. In 1990 on the full left hand side of the slide we were less than 10 billion in 20 terms of assets under management and last year we achieved over 100 billion assets under management. The fund portfolio has been faced with downturns during the period of crisis in the past. You'll see three circles come on the screen. For example the dot com crisis in the late 90s, of course the global financial crisis in 2008 and the crisis related to Covid and the post Covid inflation challenges more recently in 202122 each time the fund had a downturn as you can see in the asset value, but each time the portfolio recovered over a period of three to five years. On the next slide we see the asset allocation that is coming out of the investment policy and the strategic asset allocation of the fund. On the left hand side you see see the current or the asset allocation at the end of 2025. In the middle slide I hope you can see it well we see in the Light blue, the benchmark weight. That's the strategic asset allocation that we have in the, in the long term that we generally only revise periodically. And the last time we did that was in February 2024. And in the darker blue you have the actual allocation of the portfolio. At the end of last year, you see that we stick very closely to the range around the strategic asset allocation. At the end of December, we were 1% over in public equities, which is our largest asset class. We were at 44%. That is primarily due to the good performance of the equity markets in the recent past. We were also somewhat over weight on private equity, compensated by lower allocation to real estate, which is the other main component of private markets. And we were slightly higher in cash. And I'll refer to that in a minute. The United nations system has a investments committee of 10 external experts appointed by the Secretary General upon review by the various committees. And we actively engage with that committee generally six times a year. And we also have an internal investment committee that reviews tactical asset allocations every quarter. Now on the next two slides, let us look at the long term and medium investment performance of the investments of the fund. On this first slide we look at the performance versus the real rate of return target of 3.5%. That is very important in terms of the financial sustainability of the fund. This is the most important KPI on the investment side for the long term performance. And as you can see in the table somewhere in the middle with a light blue frame around it, we measured it at the 15 year time horizon. So as of December 2025, the last 15 years, we had on average a real rate of return corrected for inflation of 4.2%. While the target that we have determined for the financial solvency requirements of the fund is 3.5%. So we're outperforming the performance target. We are actually outperforming that on all the time horizons that you see in the time table on the slide, except the five year time horizon where we are still impacted by the downturn around COVID 19. On the next slide we look at the secondary KPI which is the relative performance of the portfolio against policy benchmarks that we've set in our investment policy statement. The total fund return over the past three years was 11.8% per annum nominal versus benchmark return of 13.1%. This performance reflects of course, strong absolute returns. However, we have some underperformance in the private equity asset class, which has an allocation of 7.9%, which we saw in an earlier slide. This is measured against a public equity based benchmark. That is if we would have invested the money in public equities, how would we have proved? However, private equity is an important aspect of our diversification policy and we did get a decent and nominal return over the last three years of 6% per annum for the private equity asset class. Now on this last slide of my presentation, let me outline a little bit the impact of the Middle east conflict over the last seven weeks. By now eight weeks actually many of you have had questions submitted about the impact on the portfolio. The Middle east conflict of course started on 28th February and significantly impacted the global economy. It's really a macroeconomic shock transmitting primarily through energy markets and affecting financial conditions in many geographies across the globe, of course impacting inflation and the risk sentiment. Market volatility increased substantially in March, particularly in those regions dependent on the Middle Eastern energy supplies. Global equity markets had a sharp sell off during the month of March based on the heightened uncertainty, rising input costs and weaker growth assumptions. Fixed income market bond markets initially benefits from the flight equality supporting for example the US Government bond to US Treasuries and other core sovereign bonds. However, the spread on corporate credits widened. The monthly performance was actually almost 5% negative in March, but has been recovered during April entirely since the ceasefire took effect. Fact and I'm happy to convey that we are now well above the 107.4 billion that we had at year end. We are close to 110 billion at the moment. We did sell some of our public equity portfolio to ensure that in uncertain times we have sufficient cash in the portfolio. And we had an active conversation with the Investor Investments Committee in March and actually we had another meeting in April. The fund remains very liquid. We have about 13% of the assets held in US government bond, US treasuries and we also have other cash and highly liquid publicly traded securities. Of course we need to make sure that we can continue to invest when opportunities arise and of course make sure that we at all times meet the benefit payments of the fund. So here I conclude Pauline, the introduction on investment management and of course we'll take some questions in a minute. Thank you very much.

Thank you both. It's always really meaningful when we have time to share with both of you. I always learn a lot. Very comprehensive overview of the fund on both fronts. Again, we are very grateful to all of you. We received about 60 questions. Most of them were addressed in both of Your presentations and 25 are currently being addressed by our Client services colleagues as we speak and the most recurring ones will be addressed. Now, my first question is to Rosemarie. It's related to inflation. We received lots of questions related to cost of living. It seems that that's a real concern for all our clients right now. So what is the fund doing to mitigate inflation and higher costs of living?

Thank you. It's a good question. Obviously, inflation protection is important to our retirees and we're very fortunate. This fund has a pension adjustment system which is designed to help protect the purchasing power of pension benefits by applying cost of living adjustments. I mentioned that in April of this year, pensions were adjusted by 2.7%. So I think that's a very important feature of this pension plan. I also wanted to add that where available, the two track feature provides retirees with an option to have their benefits linked to price inflation in their own country of residence, which provide some protection against high local inflation. Hopefully that covers off the inflation question.

Excellent. Thank you so much. So we also received a high number of questions related to survivors benefits. What tools help survivors of the UNJSPF retirees to understand their entitlements?

So, so in response to this question, and we've had this in the past, we now have a dedicated survivor benefit page with eligibility required documents, benefit types. All that information, including an explainer video, is available on our website. We also, I mentioned before that we have retirement seminars and pension town halls on a regular basis to help retirees and their survivors prepare for the steps to take when the retiree passes. So we really encourage retirees to bring their survivors along with them to one of our pension seminars so that survivors are fully informed of their benefits.

Great. Do we have time for a third question? Colleagues, thank you. Just checking. So again, Rosemarie, another prevalent question, this is one that appears very often, is related to retirement age. The question is, can I retire before I reach my normal retirement age and how does that impact my benefits?

Yes, that is a very, very common question. And the answer is yes. If you have at least five years of contributory service, you can't. At that point you're considered vested in terms of your pension rights and you can elect an early retirement benefit. And that applies if you're younger than your normal retirement age, which is 60, 62 or 65, depending on the date you joined the fund. You have to be at least 55 years of age if you joined before the 1st of January 2014 and 58 if you joined after January 2014. There's also deferred retirement benefit if you're younger than your normal retirement age. But I would really encourage everyone to go to our member self service portal and run an estimate for yourself so that you know exactly what you would be eligible for based on your individual circumstances stance. It's a really easy to use tool and provides valuable information. So check that out as well as our benefit option page on the website.

Excellent. Thank you so much Rosemarie. Now my next questions are to Rob. The first question, I mean we received a lot, lots of different questions related to safety of investment. Can you speak about how secure the investments of the UNJSPF are please?

Thank you Pauline. Of course a key question, probably the first question that everybody has on their mind when looking at investments and let me try not to be too technical, but I will focus on the first bullet on this slide, particularly the second sentence. As per here at the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund Risk Appetite Statement. The fund maintains an overarching low risk appetite specifically for long term insufficient returns. It says low risk. It says long term insufficient returns. Really what we need to do and people need to understand that we invest for the long term. We take knowingly and willingly investment and market risk to achieve a return because unfortunately if we just put the money in the bank account it will not achieve sufficient returns for us to have the long term viability of the pension scheme. So we invest for the long term and we have and we select and manage our assets based on this long term investment policy with strong risk management and diversification in asset classes and markets. And we recognize by doing that there could be short term volatility that impacts our investment performance in the short term. For example, as we saw on the earlier slide, there has been impact of the.com crisis, of the crisis relating to the global financial crisis in 2008, Covid etc. But each time we saw that in three to five years we recovered the assets of of the funds. And you probably recall my first slide going from 9.1 billion 207.4 billion in 35 years with some downturns. But we invest for the long term and effectively we look at at 50 to 70 years actually from the actuary perspective, from the pension fund, from the investment perspective a little more like 10 to 15 years into the future. But we then have some downturn and of course people watch the news and you have instant access to the latest financial figures from Wall street this morning, probably even during our conversation. But we should look at long term performance. I should have said earlier that we have quite a bit of information available on the website in terms of monthly performance reports, in great level of details by asset class, etc. And, and that is important, of course. We have many stakeholders, we need to be entirely transparent. But we should also look a little bit at the more longer term figures in those reports and not necessarily at the month of March or April of 2026.

Excellent. Thank you so much. We also received a number of questions related to investment restrictions. So the question simply reads, does the Fund have restrictions on its investments?

The answer is yes, but you probably want to know a little bit more about that. Of course, I mentioned earlier that our investment policy statement is the framework for our eligible investment universe and risk management. We take our decisions within that framework and responsible investment sustainability, sustainable investment is integrated in that process. It's not a separate objective. It does not override our fiduciary duties as the manager of the Fund. And we will review performance against our policy benchmark and long term objectives of the Fund. And we prioritize stewardship and engagement for driving change at companies in our portfolio investments in our portfolio. But we do have selectively exclusion criteria for sectors in our investment policy, particularly as you see at the bottom of this slide, long standing weapons related exclusions. Companies active in all these sub sectors of the defence industry, particularly controversial weapons, including chemical, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, ammunition, land mines, etc. So we exclude those completely from our portfolios. We also exclude tobacco related companies that have more than 15%1 5% of the revenue related to tobacco, in line with the WHO framework conventional tobacco control. Importantly, we have made good progress in climate related divestments. Fossil fuel related exclusions. Companies that derive more than 1% from revenue from thermal coal or more than 10% from fossil fuels, we generally divest from those companies or not invest in these companies, but we can invest if they have a credible transition plan for their energy production. By that these related restrictions on fossil fuel, we have reduced the emissions financed by our portfolio by 48% since 2019. Finally, we have another category which I didn't specify on this slide. It's norm based exclusions. We pay special attention to companies flagged for violations of the UN Global Compact which addresses human rights, labor, environment and anti corruption principles. This last exclusion factor is managed on a case by case basis rather than exclusions across the portfolio. Thank you.

Excellent. Thank you so much for the comprehensive overview. Since our timekeepers have said that we're doing okay on time. On the time front, I have one question that is a general question. And so considering the current global situation, political Turmoil, financial instability and rapid economic changes. How do you, either of you, assess the financial position of the unjsbf, its solvency and its liabilities?

Thank you, Pauline. I think I'll take this one again. Perhaps Rosemary may add to that. I think we're, we're sort of. Let me first refer to the opening slides of Rosemary's presentation because I think that's where she addressed the financial solvency and the strength of the fund. As we alluded to, we have actual valuations every two years to assess the liabilities of the fund and of course the assets that we manage to meet those liabilities. We're doing one at the moment. We will present that to the Pension Board in July. As I mentioned earlier, we have an asset liability management study every four years. We're starting one for the next cycle. And at the end of 2024, the assets exceeded liabilities by about 11% that is expected to increase in 2025 because we had solid investment returns. The global situation is of course uncertainty due to politically, financial markets are volatile. But as I tried to outline before we invest for the long term in managing the sustainability of the fund, it's important to note that we are a defined benefit plan. So beneficiaries payments are not impacted by short term market fluctuations. They are, as Rosemary outlined in her part of the presentation, managed in, in a very disciplined scheme of decisions with the Pension board. So I think we are in a good situation with this fund. It's been 76 years, I think that the fund has been in existence. I have the pleasure of joining this fund only in the recent months, working with an excellent team of professionals at the Office of Investment Management, but also working very closely with Rosemary and the pension fund administration colleagues across the globe. Also the colleagues in Geneva, Bangkok and Nairobi. And it's a pleasure to support the fund. I have to say I'm also a 20 year colleague in the UN system, so it's important to me personally. But of course I recognize the full importance of the pension fund in the employee relationship with the UN system. And we have many stakeholders, retirees, active participants and hopefully this has helped in our communication with that community. But of course we're available for any further sessions. Thank you.

Thank you both. Well, before we conclude our session today, can I please very kindly ask the two of you to share 30 second closing message to our clients? Watching and listening today.

30 seconds isn't a lot of time. But if I was to summarize, I'd say that our priority at the fund is the security of your pension. And it's a responsibility that we take very seriously. We continue to modernize our processes, strengthen our service delivery and really ensure that the fund remains viable and very strong for decades to come. Robert?

Well, I can say here, here, but I also add the responsibilities that we have on the investment management side. Of course, we remain fully committed to responsible, transparent and long term investment stewardship. The pension assets are managed with care prudence and global best practices. We continue to try to apply improvements throughout the management of the fund. I think we've done a lot over the years in investment management, risk management, operational management, but of course we continue to develop for the benefit of all the stakeholders of the fund. Thank you very much, Pauline.

Thank you both. That was very impressive. Yes, 30 seconds is really not a lot of time. Again, thank you, Rosemary. Thank you, Robert. And of course to all of you who joined us today, thank you for your time and for your questions. Without them, we wouldn't be able to do a town hall with your participation. Again, we remind all of you that the recording of the session will soon be available via unwebtv and of course on our website, unjspf.org we would like to ask you you to take a minute to please fill out a short survey about today's session is right on the screen. Your feedback is very important to us. We also invite you to participate in our upcoming pension information sessions. You can go to our website to learn more about that and I also invite you to follow us on LinkedIn. It is never too early to know your pension. We also have a WhatsApp channel, a YouTube channel, very active. And please visit our website for updates, guidance and of course, if you have further questions beyond the questions we've addressed today. Thank you again. Take care and we look forward to seeing you at the next global town hall. Thank you.