The Inside Story of How the United Nations Investment Office Made a Plan to Rebuild

The United Nations investment office is a complex behemoth. But Pedro Guazo, who is now leading the $81 billion fund, has a plan to tame it.

In 2020, the fund’s former leadership resigned, an internal audit revealed a “toxic” culture, and pandemic-induced volatility dogged the portfolio.

As the fund embarked on its search for a new chief investment officer, Guazo spoke with亚博赞助欧冠关于联合国投资办公室的改进计划，包括文化变革，招聘人员，并将衍生品引入其交易策略。

养老金傅nd’s cracks began to show publicly in 2019, when, at its annual meeting, Sudhir Rajkumar, the former Representative of the Secretary-General for the investment of the pension fund’s assets, called the pension fund “营养不良” and asked for the resources necessary to staff up.

Less than a year later, on March 29,he resigned, citing personal reasons. By that day, the养老基金丢失了roughly $10 billion in assets under management to pandemic-induced market volatility, falling to $63 billion.

Rajkumar’s resignation came amid an internal audit of the investment management office — which, according to the July results, revealed “divisiveness” among staff, a “toxic” culture, and “micromanagement” from senior leadership. Rajkumar did not respond to multiple LinkedIn messages seeking comment.

进入“曾经是联合国八年的财政总监”的郭。他在临时采取了rajkumar的角色，但自从永久加入了基金。

His first order of business? Transparency.

“我称之为打开门和窗户让空气进来，”Guazo通过视频通话说。亚慱体育app

他建立了一项120天的计划，旨在当时的养老基金的主要问题：其投资组合，其文化，其组织结构及其决策过程。亚慱体育app怎么下载

“We basically planned to have three big pillars,” Guazo said. “The first one was to tackle the problems that we were facing in the portfolio.”

The fund had already started to bounce back alongside the markets, but its investment leaders chose to keep a little more of the portfolio in cash while maintaining its asset allocation strategy, Guazo said. It worked. The portfolio went from a low of $63 billion in March to finishing the year with nearly $82 billion under management. The pension is roughly 130 percent funded, Guazo said.

He credited the outgoing CIO, Herman Bril, with the fund’s strong performance, noting that he both diversified assets under management, and increased them by roughly 15 percent during his five-year tenure. Bril is leaving the fund in March to move with his family to Europe.

Since Guazo joined, the fund has also divested from thermal coal and has received approval from the UN’s General Assembly to trade using derivatives on a two-year trial basis, he said.

The changes that address the fund’s culture are, at first glance, small. The pension began publishing its weekly and monthly results online, for instance.

But that was a point of contention under Rajkumar, who had stopped publishing weekly and monthly results because they “only created noise and resulted in apprehension among pensioners,” according to an August 2019meeting summary.

[II Deep Dive:‘Toxic’ Workplace Accusations Trail UN Pension as It Searches for New CIO]

Guazo also shared an organizational chart with staffers, who he was “shocked” to learn had never seen the full picture of the pension fund’s internal organization.

Before Guazo joined, all areas of the fund — from operations to risk management — were reporting to the chief investment officer, who then reported to the Representative of the Secretary-General. The representative also had the final say on decisions made by the internal investment committees.

“In an organization like ours, when all our staff feels not only proud, but they also feel ownership of what they do, the worst thing you can do is to have a micromanagement style with all the decisions coming from top-down,” Guazo said.

他改变了基金的结构，以便首席投资官员，行动署以及首席风险官员所有向他报告，而不是CIO。

“赋予权力，即可触及的，”比尔威尔金森说，自2017年以来一直是该基金的首席运营官。“人们不想被微观造成。”

随着新的领导体系以及透明度的增加，两者期待继续实施新的文化计划，其中包括测量员工确定他们将要做的其他变化。亚慱体育app怎么下载

“We are seeing a change in the attitude of the people and that toxic environment; I think that it has decreased tremendously,” Guazo said.