Our goal is to adhere to the values of the United Nations Charter in all that we do. Our actions and behaviours will always embody the values of the Organization as we work to achieve the mandates and priorities of the Organization.
Our goal is to foster a culture of respect in the Fund to ensure that professional dialogue is conducted and encouraged in all the decisions.
For 2024, the Fund aims to:
The fund aims at ensuring client satisfaction through improved services, simplified interactions, and clear communication with participants, retirees, and beneficiaries . To this end the Fund will:
Our goal is to improve the UNJSPF's sustainability profile and position it as a leader in sustainable investing while optimizing returns. We also aim at reducing the environmental impact of the Fund’s operations and commit toward the targets set by the UN Secretariat Climate Action Plan.
We will achieve this by:
Our goal is to continue to continue enhancing our best practices for managing non-investment risks and ensuring that the Fund has the adequate resources and processes in place to set up a strong framework for risk management by achieving the following:
Risks derived from inflation and geopolitical crises: The Fund will continue to monitor possible financial and operational impacts of the high inflation environment; and take prompt action to mitigate potential risks derived from inflation and geopolitical crises.
Business Transformation: For 2024, the introduction of the new Customer Relationship Management system will pave the way for further organizational and process changes and enhanced internal controls to adopt more self-service-based, electronic, and paperless processes and upgrade aging systems to improve client experience and increase efficiency. The Fund’s Investment Section will advance in the implementation of the strategic roadmap and related projects to ensure strategic investment alignment, promote a risk-taking culture, and develop organizational agility.
Organizational Culture: The implementation of culture transformation initiatives will continue with a focus on promoting organizational values and priorities. For 2024, the Fund aims to strengthen the Fund's culture, building on the results of the 2024 Leadership Culture Assessment to track progress and identify new areas of focus.
Cybersecurity risk: the Fund will continue the Fund to enforce Information security requirements for key suppliers and applications.
Business Continuity Management: the Fund will continue to enhance its business continuity arrangements and monitor supplier viability, to strengthen its ability to maintain its critical business services during and following disruptive events.
Data Governance: the Fund will further align the Fund’s Data Strategy with the vision of the United Nations Secretary-General and with guidance issued by the United Nations on data protection and privacy.
Sustainability Risks: From 2024, the Fund will report on climate-related risks and opportunities in line with the IFRS S2 guidelines.
Our primary goal is to ensure that the Fund can serve the needs and service expectations of our stakeholders efficiently and cost-effectively. In reaching this goal, we are working toward achieving the following secondary goals:
Our principal goal is to develop a new data management strategy to become a data-driven organization. To this end we will increase data literacy, integrate data management in decision making, and develop areas of data governance, data management and best practices, reporting and developing a center of data excellence.
We aim at:
The Fund is committed to gender equality, inclusion and diversity. It also aims to achieve greater geographical representation across all positions. Over the past years, the Fund has also hired more staff members to strengthen capacity in the different teams to help support the Fund's growth, both in terms of pension administration and investment.
The Fund has committed to:
Achievements:
The Fund aims at providing excellent service to its clients and to simplify and digitalize interactions between the Fund and its clients.
Achievements:
In 2023, the Fund’s objectives were to:
Achievements:
For 2023, the Fund has implemented a governance structure, management processes, and internal and external oversight mechanisms to adequately identify, assess, manage, monitor, and report the risks inherent to its operations.
The Fund has also disclosed its non-investment risk factors (geopolitical risks, business transformation, culture, cybersecurity, business continuity management, data and sustainability) and risk governance and management practices in the Fund’s Statement of Internal Control annexed to the Financial Statements, which is available here.
Achievements:
Risks derived from inflation and geopolitical crises: the Fund started performing reverse stress testing to gauge inflation risk’s impact on Fund sustainability alongside scenario analysis, including climate scenarios. In addition, the Fund continues to diversify channels to distribute pension benefit payments, to offer new digital services to lower banking charges for beneficiaries located in countries impacted by disruptions in the international transaction system.
Business Transformation: The Fund has recognized that business transformation is required to prepare and respond to global and long-term structural challenges, and to generate better outcomes for internal and external clients. In 2023, the Fund’s Pension Administration continued to implement and extended the CARE (Client-focused, Action-oriented, Relations-builder, and Efficiency-driven) Strategy and related roadmap and projects, with a focus on integrating modern technologies and continuous improvement into business processes. In 2023, the introduction of new benefit payment channels, automated scanning and signature verification, and new functionalities in the Fund’s Digital Certificate of Entitlement provided enhanced service to In 2023, the Fund’s Investment Management section updated its Target Operating Model to define business and organizational transformation strategies aimed at achieving effective collaboration and standardized or seamlessly integrated business processes, data, technology, and communication.
Organizational Culture: Strengthening the Fund’s culture has been identified by management as key to the success of the Fund’s overall strategy. A Leadership Culture Assessment in line with the United Nations System Leadership Framework has been conducted annually since 2021 with the participation of a majority of UNJSPF staff to identify priorities for culture work. In 2023, culture work has been focused on communication, collaboration, and transformation. Complementarily, the Fund has largely fulfilled the objectives of the Human Resources Strategy 2021-2023; the training strategy and guidelines; and Gender Strategy, resulting in processes and principles to promote a more satisfied and skilled workforce and a gender sensitized work environment.
Cybersecurity risk: During 2023, the Fund continued to enhance its information security framework and processes to respond to emerging technologies and increasingly sophisticated threats, including disruptive capabilities of manipulated information and access to large-scale artificial intelligence models. The Fund continued to maintain the ISO27001:2022 Information Security Management System certification to ensure appropriate cyber risk controls are in place, and the delivery of mandatory training and awareness training to staff, including phishing campaigns. Third-party managed Security Operations Centers provide around-the-clock monitoring and incident management for security events, to ensure data assets remain protected.
Business Continuity Management: The Fund continued maintains a robust business continuity management governance framework with defined continuity plans and IT disaster recovery. The Fund has full remote working capability for all teams, to allow continuity of critical business functions and physical isolation of staff. Resilient data-center hosting arrangements are in place providing high availability for key ICT (Information and communication Technology) systems. During 2023, the Fund’s Pension Administration gradually moved ICT systems to the Cloud to enhance resilience and achieve further efficiencies, while focusing on crisis preparedness and crisis management for unexpected complex scenarios. In March 2023, the Fund’s Investment Section successfully moved to a new infrastructure as a service provider and focused on ensuring the resilience of critical service providers.
Data Governance: the Fund has undertaken projects to develop and implement a data governance framework as a key enabler to realizing the objective of becoming a data-driven organization.
Sustainability Risks: The Fund maintains a comprehensive sustainability framework and commits the targets set by the United Nations Secretariat Climate Action Plan. During 2023, the Fund expanded the mechanisms for integrating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors into investment decision-making and internal processes.
In 2023, the Fund provided the essential information technology resources and invested in technology. It continuously pursues and launches new information technology initiatives to strengthen the utilization of its tools. The Fund has also strengthened major projects including the digital certificate of entitlement detailed in the client management section below.
Achievements:
The Fund’s objective is to achieve the Data Strategy of the Secretary General for Action by Everyone, Everywhere: With Insight, Impact and Integrity, aiming at building governance mechanisms and strategy oversight to manage data as a shared strategic asset (here).
Achievements: