AFICS/NY Annual Assembly 2026

Good afternoon, everyone.
It is my honor to declare open the AFICS New York Annual Assembly, the 56th AFICS New York Anual Assembly.
It is also my honor to request the president of AFICS, New York, Mr.
Darshak Shawa to make his welcome statement.
Over to you, Darzhe.
Thank you, Nancy.
I'm going to stand up and make my presentation so I don't fall asleep.
That's the whole idea.
Well, Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends.
Welcome to the 56th Annual Assembly of Ethics, New York.
Let me start by introducing my colleagues at the podium.
Doctor Narula there, Nancy Hauri here, Katherine Pollard, who you all know, and Jay Posneel.
These are the speakers currently at the podium.
Doctor Nulla is our most senior board member and is at the podium in a capacity as the co chair of the nominating committee.
Nancy is my first vice president and Jay Posnell is my second vice president.
He also has the role of the moderator.
So please when you speak, please stick to your alloted time because he's going to be a tough moderator.
Let me also thank all the ethics members for attending the meeting, especially the ones that have come here in person, which is all of you.
But of course, it's also a big welcome for those who have joined virtually.
We have lined up for you an amazing set of speakers slash presenters and hence, it'll be an interesting afternoon.
Be ready with your questions.
Let me take this opportunity to thank all the presenters for their generous time in coming to this meeting.
Fafax New York, it has been a year of impressive achievements, but also challenges.
We have had a new committee, the events committee.
The committee was convened to respond to your request for more social activities.
They have already organized two events.
There's an upcoming event, a slow walk on the promenade along the East River, ending in the Rose Garden of the United Nations.
So please sign up for it.
I think it's going to be a wonderful event and will be enjoyable, especially in this wonderful weather that we have now.
The communications committee has institutionalized the production of the two bulletins a year.
These bulletins have been a great success, noting that this has been achieved with pro bono support of the ethics members.
The Communication Committee has also developed a new website, again with the support of ethics members and a meager budget.
This will be presented to you later today.
Other committees have also done amazing work despite the budgetary challenges.
Ethics New York has faced some financial challenges, less members, and less contributions, reduction of support from the UN noting their own financial challenges.
However, despite that, we are very grateful for the support that we get from the UN.
Ethics New York took prompt action to reduce the budget, launched a fundraising committee, and a membership drive, established a process of reimbursement of costs and re evaluated priorities.
However, it has resulted in greater workload for members of different committees.
Note, they do this on a voluntary basis pro bono.
I want to express my sincere thanks to all the volunteers, co chairs of the committee, and to all officers of the Ethics Bureau.
This is my call for more volunteers from Essics New York community.
Join one of our committees or volunteer to help us on the administration side.
It's simple, just send your request to Essics, New York.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank UNFCU for the very special partnership.
Miss Agnon, thank you for being here.
We have had to temporarily move to new offices from the fourth to the third floor of the UTR building, and the rest of the offices and conference room will be in the fourth floor of UNICEF house.
This is because our floor in UTR building will house the transition team for the PGA and later the transition team for the SG.
We will return to the Unitar fourth floor in about six months.
We are very grateful to Dos and UNICEF for the support that they have provided to us.
Let me now turn to the Charities Foundation.
The foundation has been established in 1987.
As a separate legal entity to assist members of Essex, New York, and other qualified former international civil servants.
The dependents and survivors, including current and former spouses or domestic partners and children who face critical, unusual or emergency personal hardships of a temporary nature that cannot be met through available resources.
It may also provide grants to humanitarian causes consistent with the principles of the United Nations Charter and support individuals seeking to acquire or upgrade skills for post retirement activities.
Since its inception, the Charities Foundation has made over 100 grants for a total of over $190,000.
The foundation relies on donations.
If you'd like to donate, you will find the information on the website of the charities Foundation regarding the ways in which you can donate.
Remember, it's tax deductible.
Now, let me turn a little bit away from the domestic issues to the state of affairs of the world.
As we gather here today, it is difficult not to reflect that the world is divided and crisis and suffering is deepening.
This is reflected in the quote from our current Secretary-General António Guterres, we are a divided world.
We can and must be United Nations.
This is the only way to address these issues, and this is a reminder of the reason for the creation of the UN after the Second World War.
The world needs the UN now as much as it did in 1945.
So I'll end by just recapping the quote from the Secretary-General.
We are a divided world.
We can and must be United Nations.
Thank you.
Darsek before we proceed, I just want to make a brief announcement.
If you have a mobile phone, I would ask you to now silence it, please so we don't interrupt our gust speakers today.
Thank you.
Time.
No.
Let me take this opportunity to welcome Katherine Polard, who is well known, doesn't need much of an introduction.
But however, I will introduce miss Katherine Pollard, UST for the Department of Management, Strategy, Policy and Compliance, and here she's also representing the Secretary-General.
Katherine, over to you.
Thank you very much, Mr.
President.
Mr.
Dasha Shah, the President of Ethics, New York, members of the Ethics Governing Board.
Honorable former staff members of the United Nations, dear friends and colleagues.
It is a pleasure to be here with all of you today and to once again engage with members of the ethics community here in New York.
On behalf of the Secretary-General, I would like to begin by thanking ethics leadership for its continued engagement with the Secretariat and for consistently ensuring that the perspectives and concerns of former international civil servants remain part of our broader institutional dialogue.
We are meeting at a time when the multilateral system continues to face significant pressure.
Around the world, conflicts are deepening, humanitarian needs are rising, financial uncertainty persists, and demands of the United Nations continue to grow both in scale and complexity.
At the same time, the organization itself must continue adapting to a rapidly evolving environment, one that requires us to operate with greater agility, effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability.
It is within this broader context that the Secretary-General launched the UN 80 Initiative.
The initiative builds on earlier reform efforts and seeks to ensure that the organization remains fit for purpose while responding responsibly to the financial realities facing the United Nations system.
Its focus is on strengthening coordination and collective delivery, reducing fragmentation, modernizing structures and processes, and improving operational effectiveness across the UN system.
For the Secretariat, following approval by the General Assembly last December, implementation of the first phase of administrative efficiency measures under the UN AT Initiative is now well underway.
The Secretariat is currently advancing a number of measures approved by the General Assembly in the context of budget estimates for 2026, including establishing a common administrative platforms here in New York as well as in Bangkok, consolidating our payroll processing functions into a global structure, as well as a number of relocations of posts from New York and Geneva to other duty stations.
Since the inception of UN 80, a number of important milestones have already been achieved.
First, the General Assembly approved the initial package of administrative efficiency measures last December, providing the legislative basis for implementation.
We are now in the implementation phase, and the first phase with the common administrative platform is now underway both here in New York and in Bangkok.
This is the common administrative platform.
For those of you who have been here in New York, it's consolidating all the executive offices from the departments into one service center to support New York as a global center, similarly in Bangkok.
In New York, the EO model is being rolled out together with governance arrangements, standardized workflows, as well as client service feedback mechanism because this is all about client service.
In Bangkok, entities are being on boarded in phases, and we will continue to implement during this year.
Payroll consolidation has begun moving towards a single global structure operating through centers in New York, Nairobi and Tbi.
We have had ten payroll centers operating across the Secretariat.
We've now consolidated it into one team operating in three locations.
This process is already generating efficiencies through greater standardization and eliminating parallel processes.
Relocations approved to date involve moving 223 posts and positions from New York, Geneva, and Tripoli to other duty stations at lower cost such as Vienna, Nairobi, I Tebbi, in Tunis, Valencia Bonn, and Brinisi.
The reform program is already generating efficiencies, although many of the savings will materialize progressively over time as implementation advances.
And we expect that those efficiencies will come with expected economies of scale and standardization of how we implement policy.
And this is particularly important through the common administrative platforms because that will be a consistent implementation of both human resources, administration entitlements, as well as financial policies implementation, which will generate efficiencies and cost savings for the organization, as well as improve service delivery.
We also expect to see long term cost savings and reduction through relocation of functions to lower cost duty stations.
Many initiatives continue under implementation, and therefore, at this stage, we are cautious about the pace of implementation as well as coming up with benchmarking on efficiency targets because as we know from experience, member states take the efficiency targets upfront and then let us figure it out when they approve the budget.
So we want to be very careful as to how we proceed.
So I know many of you may understandably be interested in what these reforms may mean for current staff, adjustment, the inevitable adjustments in our workforce, and then what would the future of headquarters functions look like? So on the question of how many staff will remain at headquarters, it's important to underscore that the reform approach is not based on eliminating headquarters functions, but rather on ensuring that functions are located where they can be delivered most effectively and efficiently and reviewing functions from the perspective of what is location independent and then what must remain in situ.
Headquarters will continue to retain core policy intergovernmental servicing of intergovernmental bodies, relationships with member states, as well as leadership and coordination functions.
While several aspects of these reforms continue to evolve, I want to assure you that the organization remains committed to approaching these efforts carefully, responsibly, and with due regard for staff welfare, organizational continuity, and operational effectiveness.
Dear friends, you've also raised some important questions concerning the General Assembly mandated review of the pension system.
Now, I know that we have our colleagues here from the pension fund and they will discuss these matters in greater depth.
But I will just limit myself to a few observations.
The review is being conducted under the auspices of the General Assembly Resolution 8243 and is being led by the pension board, which is a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly.
The board has established a dedicated working group to carry this work forward.
And the board is expected to provide progress reports to the General Assembly at the end of this year in the main session in 2026, next year at the main session in 2027, and then a final report to be submitted to the General Assembly at the main session in 2028.
I know many of you will want the assurance that the voices of retirees will continue to be heard throughout this process.
I am pleased to confirm that that will happen as FAFx has four seats in the pension board and is also represented within the working group, ensuring that retiree perspectives remain an integral part of the deliberations and the proposals.
The pension fund remains in a strong operational and financial position.
We all know the fund is the only retirement income for most international civil servants with no national Social Security entitlements in their home countries, and we are committed to maintaining it as a credible and stable pension system, to honor the UN's commitment to staff and to remaining competitive as a global employer.
Independent actuarial valuations and asset liability management studies conducted regularly continue to indicate that the fund is well positioned to meet its obligations and to continue to pay benefits for decades to come.
It's important to mention that the General Assembly's mandate explicitly calls for the review to respect accrued pension rights and to maintain the long term sustainability and viability of the fund.
So I think that's important that we don't lose sight of that.
In addition to pensions, the A Service Health Insurance program continues to remain a vital part of the UN social Protection framework for retirees.
The rising cost of healthcare globally is a challenge, which we take very seriously, particularly during periods of financial challenges for the organization.
So reviewing and implementing cost containment measures therefore is a priority and a key part of the annual health insurance renewal process.
Measures introduced in previous years, including requirements relating to US Medicare Part B enrollment for eligible participants, together with more recent initiatives have helped moderate annual cost increases.
At the same time, as the UN's health insurance plans are self insured, we all share responsibility in helping to contain costs.
Being knowledgeable consumers of healthcare, using in network providers where possible, and carefully reviewing the explanations of benefits all contribute to helping maintain sustainability of the system.
The administration continues to value the active and meaningful participation of Effs representatives in discussions of the Health and Life Insurance Committee, and we do appreciate the constructive engagement that continues to characterize these discussions.
On the issue of the visa retrogression and immigration related concerns affecting separating staff who wish to remain in the United States, my colleagues from DOS will touch on, they'll speak to this issue.
I won't go into any details here except to indicate that it's an issue that continues to receive attention, and we welcome Affix and other stakeholders to closely monitor the developments.
So dear colleagues, we can all agree that periods of institutional reform and financial constraint inevitably bring uncertainty.
But throughout its history, the UN has repeatedly demonstrated resilience during periods of profound geopolitical change and institutional transition.
Resilience has always depended on the dedication, professionalism, and commitment of international civil servants, including all of you gathered here today.
Your service over the years helped shape the organization that current generations now have the responsibility to strengthen and carry forward.
As we go through this current period of reform and adaptation, every engagement and contribution you bring on board remains deeply valued.
I thank you once again on behalf of the Secretary-General for your years of dedicated service and continued commitment to the ideals and principles of the United Nations.
I want to wish you a productive and successful assembly this afternoon.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, miss Pollard.
At this time, I'm going to ask if there are any questions from members of the audience here today.
I don't see any.
We did have questions in advance brought to our attention, miss Pollard.
One of them was from the Ambassador Cecilia McGill of Diplomats Without Borders, who asked, how can the United Nations system better utilize the knowledge and experience of retired international civil servants in addressing today's increasingly complex global challenges.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jay.
I think we can all agree that retirement should, first of all, remain a well earned period of fulfillment and personal pursuits, free from any expectation of continued obligation to the organization.
At the same time, retired international civil servants carry decades of operational, diplomatic, technical, and institutional experience that remain immensely valuable to the United Nations system.
So if voluntarily and let me emphasize voluntarily, and appropriately harnessed.
This expertise could really support, for instance, knowledge sharing, institutional memory preservation, advisory support for colleagues who are currently in service, who continue to deal with increasingly complex global challenges.
For example, through virtual mentoring, participating.
We have many communities of practice in different areas where there are forums for knowledge sharing, training initiatives, or short term advisory support.
Now you know that these days we have no money, so large scale remunerated arrangements may not be feasible right now, but there may be still opportunities for those retirees who want to remain connected to the UN's missions and values.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for ethics to lead a broader conversation among retired colleagues, maybe For instance, through a survey or a consultative exercise on how former colleagues themselves envision contributing and under what modalities they may be willing to engage and once we perhaps have that broad feedback, then to engage with us in the administration and see how we can shape that and formalize that.
I would just add that given these times of challenge for the organization, I don't like to use the word difficulty.
One of the challenges we have always had and I'm sure This was there also when you were all in service is for the organization to really be able to articulate in concrete terms the impact of the work that is done and how it actually changes the lives of people as they go about their everyday lives.
I think we have great communications, but how do we make that link with the average person? For instance, every time we may get on an airplane, how many of us really think that the airplane takes off and lands and all the cabin procedures are prescribed by ECO? So that is a benefit that the UN brings to everybody.
Something simple, even, for instance, people who don't like the UN still benefit from it in that way.
You are all here in New York.
I think it would be great also if you engage with your since you are resident here now, you can do it with your political representatives to really articulate the benefit of the UN and what the UN contributes not only to this country, but also to the world.
I think that's actually very important, that kind of advocacy for us at this time.
Thank you.
I'm going to take one question from the floor and that's it because we are on a strict time budget.
Yes.
Thank you.
Catherine, this is a music for our ears.
One year ago, a group, a lot of people are thinking the same way.
I think it is already an effort ongoing of creating better a platform, better help the present UN harvesting and we can share with you details to get your advice, to go further affix is a real affix, and I think you have stroke a point in the heart of each one of us to create a wave of, I'll say, counterination, and let the people say when the land on a plane ICO did the safety procedures.
Thank you very much and we appreciate your intervention, and we hope you can together build up with low cost a great platform for helping the new Secretary-General in these efforts.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Darsk.
Katherine Pollard, I find it difficult to say USG Katherine Pollard.
I've known you for so many years.
Thank you.
Thank you for your insightful presentation, responses as well as suggestions.
We will take up your suggestions and come back to you with some more information on that.
But thank you for devoting your valuable time to come to this meeting.
As you can see, there's a tremendous amount of interest in your presentation.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Counsel.
Thank you.
As we are changing seats, let me take this opportunity to invite ASG miss Anne Marie Van Den Berg to the Essex Assembly.
This is the first time she's attending the assembly, so very, very warm welcome.
Of course, you and I have worked previously on different things.
So it's wonderful to have you here.
She's representing USG Abdulkare at this meeting.
Over to you.
Thank you so much and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It is my pleasure to be here today representing USG Cate.
He's currently not in New York.
In fact, he's stuck traveling, so he's unable to attend, but he does send you all his warm regards.
I will share with you some updates on the work of the Department of Operational Support in the context of the UN 80 initiative and also our broader operational work.
Over the past year, increasing financial constraints and evolving mandates have required us to sharpen our focus and to deliver in a more targeted and efficient way.
Turning first to UN 80, the General Assembly approved the revised estimates on 30 December 2025, and for DOS, this included two major milestones.
The first one was the approval of the one EO consolidation, which did bring together 11 EOs.
There's a phone that's ringing.
Can you please? I thought there was some background, please silence your phones if you haven't already done so.
Thank you.
The approval of the one EO consolidation brought together 11 EOs that are now providing administrative services under DOS to about 50 entities and clients and therefore reduces a lot of duplication.
It enables a leaner and more coherent service model.
The second milestone was the consolidation of the one payroll, moving from eight dispersed payroll offices to a single integrated global team.
This reform is strengthening accountability, improves business continuity and also represents a major efficiency gain.
In another key area in DOS in supply chain, we are also making significant strides as we increasingly focus on those categories of goods and services that most benefit from centralized planning and sourcing.
UN 80 is further advancing that model.
A key initiative is the integration of supply chain activities across the UN system, building on our success during the system wide medical evacuation and vaccination programs during the COVID 19 pandemic.
Do you remember that? Yes.
DS is co leading this effort together with WFP, UNICEF, IOM, and UNHCR to deliver end to end solutions, starting in five priority humanitarian contexts.
At the same time, approved budget reductions, including the abolishment and redeployment of posts mean that we cannot sustain the same breadth of activities.
We are prioritizing core mandates, simplifying processes, and scaling back lower impact work, and we are increasing the use of automation and digital tools.
Part of this also includes moving functions closer to the field, with the relocation of activities to locations such as Brinsi, Valencia, and Taba and Nairobi, reflecting a shift toward greater proximity to operations and cost effectiveness.
In this process, we are redistributing functions, learning new skill sets, and instilling greater staff flexibility, supported, of course, by training and careful transition planning.
For example, in recruitment, new tech assist tools, such as application screening and talent sourcing are reducing manual workload, improving consistency, and supporting more equitable outcomes, while, of course, maintaining human oversight.
We are also advancing digitization, including a client relationship management system and the transition to electronic records.
While UN 80 brings significant change, it is also an opportunity to build a more agile, efficient, and integrated organization.
Would now like to highlight some key areas of work that are underway in DS alongside the UN 80 initiative and despite significant resource constraints.
A key example has been the establishment and operationalization of the United Nations Support Office, USO in Haiti in support of the non UN force, the gang suppression force, known as the GSF.
This was following the Security Council Resolution 27 93, for which DS was designated by the Secretary-General as the lead department.
And thanks to the extensive work conducted by DS and OICT in collaboration with all Secretariat partners, we met the mandated timelines.
We assumed responsibility for mission support services to Binu, another mission in Haiti by first February 2026 and full logistical responsibility for the GSF, the non UN force by 31 March 2026.
So this included reaching key achievements through rapid procurement, aviation support, expedited recruitments, strategic and policy development support with regards to the GSF force generation, negotiations with troop and police contributing countries, establishment of medical and medivac capacity, and ICT services, to name a few.
US DC traveled to the Dominican Republic and to Haiti at the end of March and handed over his interim role of head of USO to the recently appointed ASG miss Danielle La Kroslak on 1st of April.
DOS will now continue to support USO with strategic guidance to ensure the sustainable implementation of its mandate and naturally through the provision of operational support.
Ds is no stranger to evolving landscapes and thanks to the dedication and hard work of our colleagues, continues to play a central role during periods of rapid change.
This included the contingency planning efforts of last year, which progressed smoothly despite exceptionally compressed timelines and with DOS guiding missions throughout significant reductions.
At the same time, we continue supporting mission transitions from the UNI liquidation, which the USG also visited in January to ongoing and evolving requirements in Somalia as UNSOS continues its support to African Union forces in Somalia while UNSMS prepares to draw down.
We also continue to provide support in time of crisis, including the current Ebola outbreak with many parts of the department directly involved, including the Division of Healthcare Management and Occupational Safety and Health, Human Resources Services Division, the Division of Administration, and my own Office of Supply Chain Management, all working to provide guidance to the missions as safety, health and well being of UN personnel remain our top priority.
We have always been and we continue to be at the forefront of discussions on efficiencies and improvements in the way we work, building on the gains of management reforms to identify and effect further efficiencies and improvements.
As an example, here in New York, DOS, with the understanding and cooperation of staff, has been able to significantly reduce the rental footprint, enabling more efficient, effective, and sustainable program delivery by entities through the savings gained.
Affix has been a part of this important initiative, and I want to take the opportunity to express our appreciation for your cooperation in agreeing to temporarily relocate from your space in the UT Building to the UNICEF building to allow for the accommodation of the incoming Office of the General Assembly President, as well as the new Secretary-General transition team whilst the renovation of DC two is ongoing.
I understand you have raised a question regarding the situation for staff separating from service wishing to remain in the United States.
We recognize that visa retrogression remains a significant concern for retiring staff who wish to remain in the United States after their service with the organization.
Based on the latest update from the host country authorities in the monthly visa bulletin, United Nations staff seeking permanent residence are facing a backlog of approximately four years, meaning that retiring staff continue to face lengthy delays before the cases can move forward.
There has not been a material improvement in this situation.
The Secretariat continues to monitor developments closely and remains aware of the practical and personal impact this has on staff who have served the organization and built their lives in the host country.
Any meaningful improvement would depend on action by the host country authorities, including administrative or legislative measures affecting visa availability or treatment of the category applicable to retiring UN staff.
Based on the current environment, we do not see near term prospects for such action.
We will nevertheless continue to engage as appropriate with the host country and to provide staff with the most up to date information available while encouraging affected individuals to seek qualified immigration advice based on the individual circumstances.
I know you remain deeply committed to the organization, and as actually was also just highlighted by USD Polart, retirees can continue to support the UN by advocating for its work with member states and reinforcing the importance of multilateralism.
We should never lose sight of the UN's core mission, peace and security, human rights, and development, and the importance of sharing its success stories.
It is important not to lose focus of the narrative and use your experience to emphasize the purpose of the UN, including all the success stories.
Please advocate on behalf of the organization.
On a lighter note, I would like to highlight as a special recognition for your contribution and the way to maintain engagement with former colleagues, retirees from the Secretariat, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNOS, and UN Women are now eligible to participate in UN language and communications courses offered here in New York and online.
The eligibility and registration process details can be found on the UN language website.
In closing, while we face significant challenges, we will continue to adapt through technology, partnerships, and integrated approaches to deliver better results for the people we serve.
Thank you.
Thank you, miss Vanderberg.
We appreciate that.
At this point, I just invite any questions from the floor.
I see none, and we had none in advance.
So I thank you so much for your presentation.
Thank you.
So SSG, miss Bert, thank you very much for your comprehensive presentation.
As always, there's a great amount of interest in it.
Thank you and thank you for giving us your valuable time.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Again, just a quick reminder, please silence your phones if you have not already done so.
Thank you.
I now have the honor to welcome Mr.
Jerry Barton, the president of Fasks.
He's here in person to attend this meeting.
We greatly appreciate this.
Mr.
Cherry Barton, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Darshak.
Before I begin, I should say you mentioned an event and I have just walked the East River Esplanade and it is very nice.
As long as you bring your headphones to cancel out the FDR drive noise.
All right.
Dear colleagues, it is indeed a pleasure to be here again to address the Ethics New York Annual Assembly.
This will probably be the last time that I speak to you.
I thought it was my fanfare.
Uh huh.
It will be the last time probably that I speak to you in this capacity as my four year term as the president of the International Federation draws to an end this summer when a new president will be elected.
Katherine Pollard mentioned that retirement should be a time of fulfillment and personal pursuits.
But I'll let you know if that's true when and if I ever really retire.
Okay.
So my thanks to Darshak for the invitation and for his team for their stewardship of Affix, New York, and for all that you have done over the last 51 years as a founding member of the International Federation.
First, I want to say how proud I am of the change in FFIs over the last eight years or so.
Our processes are more transparent, more associations and more volunteers are involved in the daily work of FAFX and most importantly, our reputation for solid advocacy and our influence are both higher and more necessary than ever.
Congratulations to FFIs, to the leadership, to all of you for supporting this effort.
Concerning Affix, New York as one of our 65 associations, many colleagues from Effs, New York have played a vital role in FAFx over the years.
Actually too many to mention, but I'll do it anyway.
I do want to mention Darshak, Debbie, Nancy, Jay Poznll and especially the chairs of our two major standing committees, Suzanne Bishoprick and Jay Cara.
Effs, New York, I believe, I strongly believe is an excellent example of what a local association should be and why local associations matter.
You provide community, you provide local advocacy, you provide charities and international expertise.
Like other member associations, Effs New York supports not only former staff from the local environment here in New York, but former staff of other organizations who live in the US and need local support and advocacy.
All of our member associations face challenges today.
The demographics are getting older, there are fewer former staff joining, fewer members volunteering.
There are more surviving spouses who need special care, associations increasingly need support to reach those former staff and provide aid.
Turning now to FAFX itself, I would like to touch on two topics, how FAFX works and a few of the major challenges it faces in supporting former staff rights in an increasingly chaotic world.
Over the past four years, the FAFx Bureau has made our way of working more transparent, and more professional.
When I took office in 2022, these changes were needed not only to manage a growing workload, but also to rebuild confidence in Fax as a Federation of active associations, not just a small circle of connected individuals.
I don't think that was ever true, but it was certainly the reputation.
I have received criticism recently that FAFx is still moving too slowly.
But I think we have, on the contrary, accelerated our work tremendously.
We have strengthened all of our day to day operations, and in many cases, it is indeed day to day.
Our work plan, finances and oversight are now clearer and more accountable.
When I first joined FAFX as a vice president many years ago, the bureau met perhaps twice a year.
Now we meet monthly and communications flow by email and WhatsApp and so on.
Very, very frequently.
Communications have improved through our new website and my regular updates to all associations.
More communications and more marketing are still necessary.
We need to show our value in clear terms to our membership.
Second, we are expanding the number of associations that contribute to expert volunteers through our expertise pool where the associations submit names to FAFX with a short CV of expertise.
We are identifying talent across associations and strengthening succession planning.
We are also helping to establish or revive associations in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
I believe that it is important and beneficial to have active participation in leadership from all corners of the world.
I hope that we can eventually reduce the effort devoted to our internal procedures and focus on the substantive issues which are also increasing.
We have worked hard on reform and on adapting to the new world, but we need to further demonstrate our credibility and effectiveness on substantive issues that affect all former international civil servants.
Each of our major work areas now has a team of around ten to 15 people from different associations working on issues throughout the years as members of standing committees.
At our annual council in July, your delegation from Affix, New York will also have a voice in deciding whether to add another standing committee on succession planning to help ensure strong leadership transitions in the future.
FFs must remain fit for purpose and respond agilely and with competence to the challenges as they arrive.
Just a word on after service health insurance.
The financial issues are indeed complicated, both by the IPSS accounting standards that revealed several billion US dollars in unfunded liabilities for after service health insurance throughout the UN system and by rapidly rising health care costs.
On behalf of PFX, I recently wrote to USG Poland as chair of the high level committee on management asking that FAFx have a voice there.
We do not.
And we should.
I believe that organizations do have a duty of care for their former staff.
Long term care is also an increasingly important part of health insurance as are differences in the quality of care across countries for former staff members who might have to actually go to another country to receive treatment.
Turning now to pension issues, on pension issues, the PFs major positions on matters before the pension board are determined annually at our PFs council.
Although the dynamic world we live in now requires many decisions throughout the year that I communicate to all the associations as they happen.
FAFx continues to follow many recurring issues, including the 0.5% deduction on first cost of living adjustments, improvements in pension fund services for retirees, suspensions from the two track option, and investment risks, among others.
But by far the largest issue is this General Assembly resolution adopted in December 2025, which calls for a holistic review of the entire pension scheme.
This review specifically includes examining the option of moving away from the current rules based defined benefit system, which guarantees benefits for life towards a defined contribution system under which each individual would receive what he or she paid in plus interest plus any investment gains.
Such a move, in my opinion, and I believe in PFCs position and in most associations position, I think it's clear that such a move would not be proper or beneficial to the member states or to the UN family of organizations.
Regarding the safety of the investment funds, I mentioned that Article 14 of the General Assembly Resolution 248 from December 1948, in the founding of the pension system, specifically states that the funds are separate from UN funds and can be used only for the funds purposes, I retirement, disability, and death benefits.
So I'm not worried.
The deadline for reporting back, as USG Pollard said, reporting back to the General Assembly is the summer of 2028.
In April, the pension board established a working group to define all options, costs and benefits to be examined by the board in that report.
All four regular groups are represented.
That is the governing bodies, the organizations, the participants, and PFs.
I was glad to see that Katherine Pollard also repeated that.
The four F representatives are people I trust to bring the necessary expertise and who are respected by the members of the other groups as well.
I believe they will represent Fax strongly, competently, and collegially.
They will be supported by a technical group of FAx volunteers as necessary.
The group is just starting its work and will be intensive.
At the moment, they're working on the budget proposals for the next two years because they will need to bring in outside expertise to assess the sustainability of the various options.
Through this resolution, the goal of the General Assembly clearly is to reduce expenditures and risks for member states.
Our goal is to protect the acquired and accrued rights, including the purchasing power and defined nature of our pension benefits.
That is our way forward.
There are other challenges to our pension that will increase over the next few years, including the need to preserve purchasing power amid inflation, a volatile US dollar, and investment growth below inflation.
We need to advocate for continual improvement in retiree services, including for non computer literate former staff, Though I must mention that there have been improvements over the last several years under Rosemarie McLean's leadership, and they have been exceedingly impressive.
The long term sustainability of the pension fund is paramount.
Dear friends, we need you.
We are always looking to expand member association participation in our substantive work.
Presently, some 30 individuals from 18 associations are contributing.
There is room for more, and I'm deeply grateful for their efforts on behalf of all of us and for the efforts of associations such as Affix, New York, to put forward people This is not a time to step back.
It is a time to step forward to remain connected and assist our efforts.
It is a time to advocate for the values and work of the UN systems.
I echo Katherine Pollard's and miss Vander Berg's statements.
The challenge is to articulate the value of the work of the UN organizations around the world.
Thank you for your trust and your attention today.
I wish you every success in your General Assembly.
Thank you.
I regret that I do have to leave soon because I have another engagement in Vienna on Sunday.
Thank you.
Thank you, President Thank you.
And I will not refer to you as Lame Duck President of the Federation of Associations of former International Civil Servants.
Thank you so much.
We had no questions in advance, but we do have a question from the podium.
President Barton, just before you leave us to get to the airport, on behalf of our association, Athles, New York, we would like to thank you for your leadership over the last four years.
We have much appreciated your care and concern for the former international civil servants and everything you have done for our collective well being.
Thank you so much It has been a pleasure, usually.
Thank you so much.
Do we have a question? We have a question? Yes, please.
We'll take two questions.
You need to press the microphone button in front of you.
It's red now.
Is that good? Yes.
Okay.
All right.
First of all, thank you very much, Mr.
Barton, President of FAFx, for your presentation.
And we are for those who have not noticed, he has a beautiful tie on which radiates as brilliantly as his speech.
Thank you very much.
Now, my question has to do with the following issue.
There are many former colleagues of mine who have passed away, and their widows have come to me and asked for assistance and assistance sometimes concerning pension, insurance, assistance or tax guidance, residential status, and other benefits that they might get.
And, um, In addition to the fact that there seem to be many points of contact that are required, there also seems to be a lot of it is becoming more and more electronic.
So it's harder if they don't know certain codes, if they don't know what to do, who to address or where to go, it's becoming more and more difficult for them.
So I'm just wondering if it wouldn't be possible for focal point of assistance as a little officer individual or at least a guidebook or something that we could guide them as to what they should do to get the assistance that they think they require on all of these various issues.
Perhaps such a thing exists.
I have not seen it.
If it does, maybe I've been retired too long, but I think it would help a lot if this kind of service were available.
Thank you very much.
This is addressed to AFX, to FAFX and to all of the other agencies that are raising issues that are related to these.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Yes.
I do know that several such packages, sometimes called the last envelope exist in various associations.
I'm not familiar with yours, but I think it does exist.
Yeah.
Now, there are three answers to this.
One, there could be more information available, but the first source of information is from you for your spouse to prepare to have the information available so that the surviving spouse has a piece of paper that says what your pension UID is and how to contact the pension fund and your former organization.
The second answer is that, you know the pension fund has improved services in the past five years on this as well or ten years since COVID, that there is a dedicated email address where people can report the death of a member and get assistance, and that assistance is more rapidly available now than it ever has been before.
The third is, of course, that the associations are need to do a better job in communicating the fact that these assistance places and assistance information do exist.
It is one of the topics that I discuss every once in a while with the pension fund as well.
I think there's more that could be done to have the spouse better known somehow to the pension fund while the former staff member is still alive and not have to complete everything after the former staff member passes away.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jerry.
I'll address this as well in our session later on what we do in ethics for pensions.
But we've engaged with the pension fund on this issue.
We also have a guidebook for planning for your retirement and for how to deal with questions of aging well.
A lot of this we're addressing, but we continue to work on this together with the fund and the administration.
Thank you very much, Jerry.
Anything.
Thank you.
Mr.
Barton, President of Fathics, thank you for your very informative presentation and wishing you all the best.
Thank you.
Now let me welcome Assistant Secretary-General Kersey Mardi from UN Women.
It's a very special welcome because this is the first ethics assembly that she's attending.
Kersey, over to you.
Thank you so much, Da Shak.
It's such a pleasure to be with all of you today, Jay, Nancy, doctor Narula.
I have to say here that Mr.
Narula was my very first supervisor in UNICEF when I started 35 years ago.
Seeing doctor Narula just warms my heart so much.
It's really a great pleasure for me to join you today.
Let me say a few words just about the broader context where we are living and in which UN women is guiding the efforts on gender equality and women's rights.
All of you in this room and online, you have devoted your careers to building and strengthening the multilateral system.
At the time when the pressures on the multilateralism are once again intensifying, your experience and your institutional memory matters greatly.
We meet really at the consequential moment when trust in institutions is under strained globally.
The question before us is not whether multilateralism matters, but how it delivers for the people and how it produces the outcomes that are tangible, equitable, and principled.
And gender equality sits at the center of that question.
When women remain excluded from opportunity, protection, leadership, or decision making, those inequalities often reveal where systems themselves are failing, whether in governance, peace building, economic policy, or social protection.
Today, women still earn less, lead less, own less, and carry more responsibilities.
Globally, women shoulder nearly three times more unpaid care work than men.
One in three women experiences violence in their lifetime.
More than 600 million women and girls are living in armed conflict or near armed conflict.
Yet at the same time, women continue to lead communities through crisis, often with little resources, while remaining excluded from the rooms where peace, policy, and recovery are negotiated.
We cannot build lasting peace without women at the table.
We cannot create sustainable economies while excluding half of the world's talent.
We cannot renew trust in institutions while large parts of the society continue to experience inequality as a daily reality.
These realities demand not only political attention, but institutional capacity and sustained international cooperation, and that is where UN women plays a critical role.
Since our establishment in 2010, we have operated through a unique triple mandate, advancing global norms and standards, coordinating the UN system, and delivering operational impact on the crown.
Our work focuses on four interconnected priorities.
First, on ending violence against women and girls.
We work with governments to strengthen laws, expand survivor centered services, and to prevent violence before it begins, including online violence, one of the fastest growing threats today.
But protection alone is not enough.
Equality also requires economic agency and opportunity.
Therefore, our second priority is women's economic empowerment.
We are working with governments and private sector to close pay gaps, strengthen care systems, expand social protection, advance gender responsive procurement, and increase women's access to finance, technology, and decent work.
The third priority is about women's leadership and decision making.
Only 27% of members of parliament today are women.
Representation is not simply about numbers, it is about whose realities and perspective shape laws, policies and institutions.
So therefore, we support electoral reforms, leadership training, and address violence against women in politics and in public life.
We work closely with over 10,000 civil society organizations across 128 countries to strengthen those leadership capacities.
Our fourth priority is on women peace and security.
We know that peace agreements are moderable when women participate.
Yet between 2020, 2023, most peace processes included no women at all.
Our partnerships with women led organizations in contexts such as Afghanistan, Gaza, Haiti, Sudan, and Ukraine reinforce the critical lesson.
Women are not only beneficiaries of humanitarian action, they are architects of response, of resilience, of mediation, and recovery in some sustainable future.
That brings me to a broader institutional reflection.
The UN can and must continue to lead by example.
We are proud to steward implementation of the Secretary-General system wide gender parity strategy.
In 2025, women represented 50.8% of personnel in professional and higher categories and 50% of assistant secretaries General, making historic progress towards achieving the 50 50 gender balance parity by 2028.
This achievement by no means is an endpoint.
It's a reminder of what is possible when institutions make deliberate choices and of the responsibility to sustain those choices over time.
A few words before I conclude on the UNAT initiative on which Karin and Anne Marie already referred to.
In addition to actively participating and contributing to many different elements of the UNA reform process, As many of you know, the Secretary-General, as part of the Workstream three, also requested an assessment of the benefits of a merger of UNFPA, the UN Fund for Population Activities, and of UN Women, and of our respective mandates to create a unified voice and platform on gender equality and women's rights.
The assessment report has been presented to member states last month and is posted on the UN website.
As requested by our executive boards in February, together with you and FPA, we are now working to develop also a set of complimentary alternative options intended to strengthen coherence, operational alignment, accountability, and delivery impact within the existing frameworks.
We anticipate to be able to share a more detailed articulation of the specific alternative options and related analysis with the executive boards by the end of June.
These efforts are in addition to what we call a pivoting to the regions and countries process that we established over the past couple of years and took decisions in 2024, whereby about one third of our New York based personnel will be relocating to Bonn and to Nairobi to be closer to our partners, our stakeholders, and to be operating former duty station, which is more convenient for supporting all of our offices across the world.
It goes without saying, of course, as all of us in the UN system, we are working and have been working diligently on looking at where we can achieve the greater efficiencies.
To conclude, the past decades have shown that progress is possible, but we need to acknowledge that progress is never guaranteed.
Rights can stagnate, institutions can weaken and norms that we once thought established can be contested again.
I therefore would like to invite you as part of our collective effort to use your voice and to protect the values and the principles which are enshrined in the UN Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other international legal instruments and perhaps the response to the question, Jay, that you were posing from the Diplomats Without Borders, your active engagement in communities, with the political actors as part of the civil society organizations, that all matters greatly.
The task before us is not just about defending multilaterlism, but also to renew it so that all the people understand what we stand for, that it remains credible to the people the UN was created to serve.
That renewal, of course, will depend in no small part on whether women and girls are fully included in all the decisions that shape our future.
I thank you again for the opportunity to appear here with you.
Thank you.
Miss Maddie, before you leave the floor, I'll open it up for questions, but on a personal note, I would say that I personally and I know that the women in my family personally value the focus that UN women gives to the questions and aspirations of women in this world.
And it is so enormously necessary as an institution.
And so we thank you for your work in this area.
Any questions out there? I see none.
Thank you.
There is one.
There is one.
Yes, please.
Thank you very much.
We've been hearing from all the speakers that we need to use our voice, and we do use our voice.
But it becomes very difficult and frustrating that we don't see the media nor our beloved organization defend the values of the United Nations when we have so many member states who are ignoring the charter of the UN and multilateralism.
Do we have any tips on how we can improve our voice? Please, if you wish to take that on.
Thank you.
I mean, I think it's a question for broader reflection and all, to be honest, we are all reflecting on that tremendously.
I can say from the UN women experience, we have seen the critical importance of the voice and how we are presenting issues.
We have seen actually an exponential increase in our social media following an entry to our website.
Of young women.
This has been really remarkable and this is completely organic increase.
Many organizations and companies they are actually paying in order for the traffic to be guided to their websites.
We have seen completely organic increase.
It's very interesting to see this age pattern because indeed we need to see everybody, regardless of the age, but it's also very interesting that the young women in the societies are keenly taking on are seeing the challenges that they are facing.
So I think it's all of our responsibility to speak up.
And I think as Katherine Anne Marie were saying, really using all the opportunities, I think we can always improve and do the advocacy better as a US system.
But we are trying our best, but sometimes Many people who are not so close to the UN do not have really adequate grasp of the work and the value that we do.
Like you were making the point about airplanes and the flights, I was interviewed last year in the Finn and I was also giving some very concrete examples because people are not even thinking that the United Nations could be behind.
We need to look at some of those very concrete arguments and speak with the language that resonates with the general public.
So you all have so much experience.
I hope you take that responsibility the same way as we try.
If you have any suggestions on how we can do better, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Thank you.
Thank you, miss Matty.
Just in response to the question that was posed, one thing if you can, if you're eligible, vote.
That'll make a difference.
The other thing you can do is what we do here in ethics, you have tremendous experience.
We have put together movies about the history of the UN.
We are trying to go out and make sure that that is disseminated, that kind of experience that you have.
How has the UN affected the world? It has.
I just airplanes is one example, but there's many and multilateralism is a way for governments to answer to their people and it's a tool they can use.
We know this.
We've been there.
This is something we can do.
Feel free to join us here in AFS in our work.
We need volunteers all the time, and this is how we can be out there as UN civil servants making a difference.
There are two more questions and that's all I'm going to take.
The woman in the back, please.
Yes, you, Madam.
Can you make sure your microphone is on, please? I had told myself I wasn't going to speak today, but I had lunch today before I came here with a woman from my country who is retiring soon.
But she was also talking about the issues of race within the whole gender equality thing.
Everybody is talking about gender balance, this, gender balance, that.
But within that, you also have to deal with racial balance within that.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Then this gentleman here will take your question and we'll respond.
Well, it's not really a question, it's just information.
Last year at this session, we talked with Jerry and Debbie and so on, and we talked about putting together a community of people that could do these things, the UN advocacy community.
It basically captures all of these.
If you want to help, we will be doing success stories.
We're having discussions.
Next Tuesday, we're going to have a discussion on revitalizing the UN and suggestions for the next Secretary-General.
We've got some powerful people on it as well.
They're experienced people.
The ones you know, that have spent their whole careers in the field and so on.
And I think that's something that was a deep need.
As soon as we announced it, we got a whole lot of people joining in, and I think it's unvocacy.net.
So I'm going to volunteer you now, if you're attending our after assembly event to spread the word, please.
Thank you very much.
Myself and Franco here, the two of us.
Great.
Kursy, thank you very much for a very insightful presentation which has given lens to the work of UN women, but the broader importance of gender equality.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you for the relations.
We now invite miss Pamela Agnon from UNFCU to come in and address all of you.
Here we have miss Pamela Egnon who took over about a year ago, at the helm of UNFCU is a great supporter of Ath New York.
It's really a great pleasure to welcome you here at this assembly.
Thank you, and the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Dorsa for that nice introduction.
Hello, Jay and Nancy and miss Nruula.
I want to say to APX New York elected and honorary governing boards, the governing Bureau, and the members present here today and virtually, good afternoon.
I'm really honored to attend this 56th Annual Assembly to share news and developments from the United Nations Federal Credit Union, UNFCU as well as to answer any questions that you may have in the remaining time that we have together.
I'm joined here today by several of my colleagues and many of whom you may welcome or recognize, I should say.
If anyone in the audience has a question that's of a personal nature, please see them and they will help you.
I'm going to ask them to stand and waive so you can see our leadership team.
Thank you.
We all share deep gratitude for the partnership that we have with APX New York and its leadership, as well as the opportunity to connect, to listen, and to support your many winning initiatives this year.
To begin, I'd like to address three areas of primary importance to you.
First and foremost, UNFCUs ongoing financial safety and soundness.
Second, member benefits, and last but certainly not least, our service mission, which we define as your member experience.
It's how we're best serving you in providing greater value and efficiency.
Since our last convening, the UN system and indeed the world have experienced significant change.
Despite and because of the geopolitical and economic tensions and challenges, UNFCU leaned into its enduring cooperative values, and we deepened our commitment to serving the people who serve the world.
Rest assured that each and every day, especially in times of transition and flux, we're proud to be a constant and a safe haven for our members.
We remain committed to the protection of our members assets and because of our very strong capital position, effective risk management, and very conservative banking approach, we've weathered the uncertainty associated with UN downsizing and for any more that may lie ahead.
This is underpinned by good governance set forth by our board, comprised of current and former UN system staff and a strategy of measured steady results.
To this end, in 2025, UNFCU achieved strong financial results.
Net income was $92.9 million, and our net worth was 9.47%.
You should note that that exceeds our regulators threshold for what they consider to be a well capitalized credit union at 7%.
Members continue to put their faith and trust into the credit union.
Deposits at UNFCU rose 14% among retirees and grew at a rate of 4.7% overall.
It's worth noting that deposit growth at US federally insured credit unions had increased by 2.9% in the same period.
Further to UNFCU strength, at the end of the first quarter of this year, our membership grew to more than 260,000 members, with more than 22,000 retirees globally within the UN family.
That too represents a 14% year over year increase in retirees and with the uptick in the UN system, early retirement activity, a bit of a contributing factor.
You should know that once you're a member of UNFCU you're always a member, no matter where your UN journey and your retirement may take you.
Whether you're catching up with your grandchildren, starting a new consulting gig, starting a new business, volunteering or just busy with your own travel and hobbies, UNFCU stands alongside you in retirement to provide financial peace of mind.
Simply put, against the backdrop of uncertainty, we responded with solutions from adding new how to guides and resources to our website on topics ranging from saving strategy, organizing your finances and sending money more safely to conducting seminars on fraud prevention and hands on workshops on using our digital banking platform.
We connected you with our subject matter experts, and in this way, you had access to best practices on financial resiliency and protecting your assets.
We thank the APX New York Leadership for collaborating with us to bring these events to you, and we do welcome the opportunity to host more educational sessions this year, including offering translations of presentations in other UN languages and also contributing to the Affx bulletin publication.
I hope you've had a chance to see our new monthly newsletter, UNFCU Connect, and that it's meeting your needs with the additional tips to help you make informed personal decisions about your finances.
As an organization itself approaching 80 years young, UNFCU has continued to adapt, to evolve, and to hire smart, compassionate people.
In the past year alone, our strategic investments in payment technology have fueled adoption of a faster, easier and more secure experience with favorable exchange rates and better value for our members and their families.
For example, last December, we introduced a new faster fund service as an alternative to wire transfers.
Using faster funds, members can opt for transfers to seven currencies with smaller payment amounts.
We plan to introduce more currencies during the year to give our members more flexibility to move money where and when they would like.
Additionally, in direct response to your input in collaboration with your APEX New York leadership, we're introducing even more enhancements to our member loyalty rewards program.
Effective in July, this will include boosting the dividend reward across all tiers.
As a result, we expect to return more than $1.8 million to members that are earning their member loyalty rewards annually.
Last year, along with reinvesting earnings back into the credit union for improved service, we were able to return $7.6 million to our members in the form of member loyalty rewards, and retirees earn 3 million of that amount.
Yesterday, we launched a new 11 month term share certificate for members who deposit a certain level of new funds with the credit union.
This featured share certificate will offer a premium to all other rates.
Additionally, last February, we increased our premium rate on checking to 1.75% up to $25,000, and this was up from 1% with a cap of 15,000 for money that you can access anytime.
Qualifications include receiving E statements, making ten debit card transactions a month, a monthly external deposit of $500 or more, and having an average monthly checking account balance of at least $500.
Look for more information in the coming months on additional enhancements to our premium checking program with more global options to earn premium rates on checking, as well as more bundled packages to earn you and your family even more rewards.
We know that UNFCUs rates are an important competitive factor to you and you can be confident that cumulatively, UNFCU returns great value through new and existing products that address the needs of our UN community and delivers on peace of mind.
Further to your financial wellness and requests for service enhancements, UNFCU continued to improve our contact center response times.
At year end, our contact center answered your voice calls and emails 25% faster than the prior year.
We were able to boost efficiencies with our cutting edge contact center platform and ongoing product knowledge and service excellence training for staff.
An experienced, even longer tenured team is delivering consistently higher quality and more effective interactions with our members as a result.
UNFCUs newest regional Kenya based contact center has also bolstered our ability to support members across multiple time zones, improving responsiveness and overall service continuity.
You can also now connect with more native French and Spanish speaking member service representatives.
We also took the opportunity to centralize credit and debit card operations to speed up card delivery on replacement.
Satisfaction levels among our former international civil servants remains high based on our ongoing efforts to best serve your needs.
In our most recent survey, 93% of retiree respondents agreed that UNFCU provides financial peace of mind and this was an uptick from last year.
Last year was at 92.5% on 100 point scale, which are very high marks.
Further, to ensuring your peace of mind, I can't stress enough the importance of keeping the beneficiaries on your accounts with the credit union up to date, or if you haven't already done so, make sure that each of your accounts has a designated beneficiary.
You can easily do this, by the way, on digital banking and adding beneficiaries.
It just ensures that there's a smooth transfer of funds when your family and loved ones need them in the future.
Also, just a reminder to review the joint account holders that you have on record with the credit union and make sure that there aren't any updates needed.
From financial products, services, and education, I now want to turn to social responsibilities with the UN sustainable development goals.
In 2025, UNFCU marked a decade of positive impact for our global sustainability program, which successfully completed its five year impact goals.
The range from maintaining climate neutrality to engaging the credit union industry as a whole on the SDGs.
Our UNFCU Foundation also celebrated its tenure of sustaining pathways for poverty for marginalized women and youth, and the foundation has transformed more than 140,000 lives since its inception through providing access to quality education, critical health care, and livelihood training.
This work spans micro businesses for widows in Kenya to savings groups for young entrepreneurs in Guatemala.
UN FCU's longstanding commitment to social purpose stems from our board's governance mandate that UNFCU operate as a good citizen of the world, and our staff is at the forefront of this effort.
Their diversity of cultures, of backgrounds, and perspectives is our strength, and it's enabled us to better connect and serve our members, as well as invest in our communities through the more than 11,000 volunteer hours our staff have put forward for their communities.
It's our commitment to conducting ongoing competitive research and analysis, as well as your critical feedback that enables you and FCU to move forward in service of all our members throughout all their life stages.
In fact, according to Bradley Sherman, Bradley is a well known demographic futurist.
The biggest force shaping the future is not technology.
It's demographic shifts for older populations.
Schulman recently spoke to our board and executive leadership and his presentation was quite informative.
He defines our current global era as the super age in what he terms as a seismic shift in the world's population where older people are having far reaching impact on economies and society.
According to his research, by the year 2050, older generations, people aged 65 and up, will outnumber younger individuals.
This is going to have big implications for financial services, and you can rest assured that UNFCU is prepared to support a growing number of retirees that will be its members.
That said, given our many interactions with you and our close relationship, we know that retirement, it's complicated.
It often spans 20 years or more, and your careers can have multiple stages in retirement.
It's clear that a growing number of those over the age of 65 represents the new normal in the super age.
UNFCU is addressing this global shift, preparing for more changes to come, and please be assured we will be by your side every step of the way.
Tapped into your needs for simplicity, for transparency, for accessibility, our organization, the leading financial cooperative across the UN system, founded by UN staff right here in New York is dedicated to committing to creating innovative solutions that focus on longevity, protecting capital, and providing more holistic guidance over longer time horizons.
Octogenarians and above are now the fastest growing demographic in the world, according to the United Nations.
A UNFCU enters its 80th year, we're not about to slow down anytime soon, and I'm sure none of you are either.
We remain financially strong and growing.
Please know that, and we're expanding our reach and including opening new offices.
Your UN service to build a better world remains our source of inspiration.
Our retiree community is particularly valued, very much close to the heart.
We appreciate your loyalty and your feedback.
It really does help us to improve service for all members.
My colleagues and I enthusiastically stand by your purpose to build the APX New York community through greater engagement opportunities for your members in the New York area and in other US locations.
And I want to conclude my remarks by thanking Ahex New York leadership for their invitation to connect with you today.
And on behalf of our board of directors, my colleagues on the leadership team, our dedicated staff, our volunteer committees, I appreciate and thank you so much for your trust, your vitality, and for the opportunity to serve your financial needs.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Pamela.
I'm going to actually ask a question for all of you.
How many out here have a UNFCU account? There you go.
That should warm your heart.
I would imagine that those who are online, you would get a similar positive response.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Any other questions? Yes.
We'll start here and then we'll go to this lady in the back.
Okay.
Yes, sir.
Thank you so much.
It's not a question, it's a suggestion to miss Pamela.
First of all, really, I would like to congratulate you for the excellent work UNSU is doing, the professional of the staff.
We are very, very happy of this work.
And my suggestion is that when you go to the U of the Federal Credit state, we serve those who served the world.
I would suggest that we serve those who serve and have served the world.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes, ma'am.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
My question is, does the credit union give loans for home bank for retirees abroad? Thank you for your question.
The Credit Union offers international home loans.
Retirees are eligible to apply, qualified based on their pension income and their assets.
It's actually quite one of the credit unions most popular lending programs, in fact, yes, that's available.
And these folks over here would be glad to take your application.
Yeah.
One more.
One more.
We'll take one more.
Yes, ma'am.
First of all, Okay.
First of all, I'd like to thank miss Anon for a very insightful insight on the feedback on what the Credit Union is actually doing right now.
But also, I would also like to thank your prestigious organization for solving.
I was a victim of a scam or spoof calls, and it was two years ago and it was not a small amount.
I would like to thank you very much for helping in resolving that.
But in addition, I would like to pose a question on how do you upgrade your security measures so that incidents of that sort don't happen again.
I see that you are always giving us reminders.
Oh, please don't go to I mean, don't entertain calls or whatever.
But then your phone numbers have been spoofed for by the scammers and that is how I fell into becoming a victim.
My question is, how do you upgrade your security measures? Thank you.
Yeah.
First, I'm sorry you had that experience, but I'm glad that our teams are able to help you navigate through it.
Very alarming when you fall victim to scams.
Credit Union invests heavily in safeguarding its systems.
We work with third parties to try and see how often, it's an arms race in terms of the bad actors that are out there trying to have new schemes come out and we contract with third parties that can help us stay up to date on what the latest scams are to conduct penetration testing on our digital platforms.
We try to do more and more member education because at the end of the day, it's all about not clicking, not giving your credential, not engaging with that individual who has called you and the more we can create member awareness about these scams, the more protected you are and the more protected the credit union is.
But we have heavy investment with third party experts to help us understand what's happening on the dark web and how we can protect our members and the credit union.
Thank you, Pamela.
Thanks so much.
Darcie.
Well, Pamela, thank you so much for a wonderful presentation.
As you can see, there was a tremendous amount of interest in your presentation, lots of questions, and once again, thank you for addressing the assembly and the wonderful partnership which will continue to grow.
Thank you.
I think I separated.
Thank you.
I'm.
How are you? So let me take this opportunity to now introduce Mr.
Dino Cataldo del Accio.
I hope I pronounced it correctly.
Perfect.
The Deputy Chief Executive of Pension Administration, UNGSPF.
He's representing miss Rosemary McLean, Chief Executive of UNSPF.
She sends her apologies, Dino, over to you.
Can we Belamere get that on the screen? There we go.
Okay.
Perfect.
Thank you very much, Darst.
Thank you very much, colleagues from Ax, for giving us the opportunity to provide you the annual update.
As Darst alluded to, first and foremost, I would like to bring the regards of miss Rosemary McLean, the chief executive who could not be here today, but she delegated me to make this presentation and update to this distinguished audience.
I have a few slides simply to share and present some key information and messages regarding the status of the UN GSPF activities.
First and foremost, I would like to reassure the representation of the UN GSPF that we have a strong pension plan.
Some of you indeed have expressed concern about the financial situation, the UN system, and beyond its impact on your pension.
Indeed, we heard from previous speakers many of these concerns have been present and have been addressed, such as the UNA initiatives that the Secretary-General has launched.
There are a few important points I want to leave you today about the strength of the fund, the security of your benefit and how we are preparing for the future.
The fund is in a strong financial position, and your benefits are secure.
The funds ability to pay benefit is monitored closely and periodically through two main processes, the actuary evaluation, which is conducted every two years, and the asset and liability management studies that are conducted every four years.
The last one was conducted in 2023.
These studies, both of these studies, the outcome of these studies show that the fund is in a strong and good financial health.
The participant numbers, I understand that we understand that the latest numbers, the latest announcement about the downsizing of certain UN entities that created concern about the fact that participants are decreasing.
But the participant numbers have a limited impact on the fund solvency.
On this matter, you will hear more from our RSG vis-à-vis the contribution or the return on the investment actually make to the long term solvency of the fund.
In addition, we are modernizing our services to continue to meet our performance target and deliver the highest standards of service, and we are committed to transparent, clear, and timely communication to our participants, beneficiary, and stakeholders.
So this chart should summarize where we stand vis the solvency position of the fund.
The actual evaluation of the fund measures whether the level of contribution will be sufficient to pay or benefit in the future.
As you already know, the contribution rate of 23.7% of pensionable demeration with 7.9 coming out of salaries and 15.8% is being paid by the employing organization.
This graph shows the result of the fund actual evaluation over the past 40 years.
These are snapshot that are taken a specific time a specific period to determine the position of the fund and the contribution rate.
As you can see, through the challenging period in the early 80s and into the long term stability, we have maintained over the last two decades a positive result, a surplus.
The dashed line above and below the zero show a small buffer, which we call it the tolerance plus or -2%, which around the contribution rates is needed to pay the benefit.
When result stay within these two lines, it indicates that the fund remains financially stable over time.
So solvency is not measured by the value of the asset at any single point of time, but rather through long term projection of contribution, investment returns, and benefit obligation.
These are scenarios that are studied, that are generated, that are simulated with the asset eliity management studies.
And these studies show that we continue paying benefit for the next 70 plus years.
Importantly, I want to reiterate that declines in the number of US staff, a concern, again, that is expressed in many fora, have limited impact on the fund solvency, because we are not overly reliant on future contribution to pay accrued benefit.
So The resolution that requested a study talked about the pension scheme.
Just to remind ourselves, the current scheme that we have at the pension fund, we have a defined benefit plan, which means that our plan is based on our financial average remuneration, on the years of contributory service and on our age of separation.
It's not therefore dependent on short term market movement.
Your benefits also include inflation protection, either through the periodic adjustment based on the US consumer price index or for those who are on the two track system, the consumer price index of their specific country of residence.
This year, the cost of living adjustment for the dollar track is 2.7% starting from one April.
Under the two track system, pension are adjusted to local inflation to help protect against exchange rate changes.
So again, just to reiterate on one of the most concerning point.
In December last year, the UN General Assembly mandated the pension Board to conduct a holistic review of the UN GPF pension scheme.
This is part of a broader UN reform, as you heard before from miss Pollard.
But it does not signal any change to your benefit today, and no decision had been made.
Indeed, a working group has been appointed, it will conduct a study, it will report annually, and is due to report on the final report in 2028.
The General Assembly has the board to review the pension scheme, including the pension adjustment system, and to assess option for the pension scheme design.
So this process, as alluded to before, is led by the pension board.
But what I also would like to share with you that this is not the first time that the pension fund scheme has been subject to a review.
Indeed, many of you probably recall in 2010, there was a similar review following a deficit that occurred in the pension fund solvency, which led, for example, to increasing the retirement age 62-65 for those employed after 2014.
So just to reassure you that this is not the first time and does not necessarily mean that the outcome will be a change in the pension scheme, but there are different option available to make adjustment to our system.
Let's now move to some data about performance.
So definitely 2025 has been a record breaking year for the UN SPF service delivery.
We had over 22,000 benefit process, an increase of 58% compared to 2024.
We process more than 95.5% cases within our standard benchmark of 15 days and for the initial separation, we process 98.1% within this standard benchmark.
We address more than 114,000 client queries handled with an average response of 2.5 business days and the call weight for the call center was around 15 seconds per call.
We are also continuing starting from 2020 with the issuance of the care strategy on our modernization journey.
We have implemented a new CRN system, customer relationship management that we name Connect.
Which allows our client service, our call center, our internal offices to have everything in one place.
All the information related to each one of you, including also the active participant and beneficiary in order to be able to answer in a faster way.
We have automated the separation processing, a famous form for those who are knowledgeable about this internal mechanism, that basically help the transfer information from the member organization to the pension fund, which in turn enable us to meet the standard benchmark of processing within 15 days.
There were concern shared before about security.
Indeed, we enhanced our security system by implementing dual or multi fact authentication, requesting an additional form of verification to make the access to our system more secure.
We proceeded with a comprehensive data cleansing exercise.
We automated and we implemented electronic forms, of course, in addition to keeping the manual form because we want to make sure that we always allow for the manual vis-à-vis and in parallel to the digital.
Also, as you know, since 2021, we made available the digital certificate of entitlement, an app that allows each one of you to confirm proof of life on an annual basis.
We have a new members of service that went live last week, we hope that the new portal will enable you to have a more user friendly experience with our platform and also being able, if you want, we introduce the epension that is specifically designed to allow you to input information related to your banking and financial institution.
We are reviewing the pension form and we also adopted and implemented artificial intelligence to make sure that our client survey, our call center, again, can benefit from this technology by having immediate access to your file, to have an overview of the history of your call and being able to better serve and to address all your question.
Here, I just included some of the screenshots of the new portal just for your information, but I definitely invite you to visit our new system and try and, of course, we will very much welcome any type of feedback you can provide.
This is the online submission portal for the Epenion.
Concluding with some data about outreach and engagement, as you can see, we have been very active thanks to our client service communication office.
We have conducted 33 global session with a number a record of 42,000 plus view We had measured 2.3 million views in 2025 of our website, an increase of 15%.
We are present in different social media platform and we have 20,000 followers, and we have measured through a survey conducted last year, your satisfaction, and we receive a four out of five.
So just some again, I saw that some of you are taking snapshots of the slide.
Of course, this slide had been shared with the Affix colleagues and will be made available to you, but just in case, again, to provide the contact information about our office.
In summary, I conclude the fund is secure.
We are modernizing and improving your service experience.
We will continue to communicate openly and transparently, and it's never too early to know more about your pension, please visit our website.
Thank you.
Dino, thank you so much, Dino.
A couple of points that you made.
One is that you've shared the PowerPoint, and I think I saw a lot of people taking pictures, so we'll be sure to share that with our members and thank you for that.
I think it's important, and I always stress this, that you said that we have enough money to pay benefits for the next 70 years.
I usually use the number 40.
But 70 sounds good.
I plan on living another 70 years.
I appreciate I appreciate that's going to be there for me.
Then lastly, and I'll address this later, but one thing in this holistic review that the General Assembly invited us to do was to make sure that any changes to the plan design respected acquired rights.
You've acquired rights to your benefits, and I think that's important to emphasize that you've already acquired a lot of legal rights to your benefits.
Any changes should not affect necessarily your benefits.
It may affect aspects, but we'll see how that goes and like you said, you'll be monitoring and providing updates on this.
The point is not to panic for us as beneficiaries.
I think it's the question of a routine plan design review, which is necessary from time to time and we'll see where this leads.
Thank you so much.
Do we have questions? Do we have questions out here? We have one in the back.
Yes, ma'am.
Well, I think you have partly answered it.
I thought this review would affect future pensions, the present staff members.
But let's suppose they change from a defined benefit plan to a different one.
It wouldn't change ours.
Our pensions will still continue this way or we're not sure.
I wonder.
We can't be certain, but the General Assembly said we have to do this in a way that respects acquired rights and acquired rights are a legal right.
You've earned this.
This is a pact that was made between the United Nations and its staff.
You worked, you earned, you put money into the system.
I think that the regulations can't just eradicate that.
Now, of course, we'll see where this leads, but I don't think it's something that we pensioners need to worry about.
I think it's for the future of the UN, an organization that we've all served and love and continue to support that we have to be concerned.
Thank you.
I have nothing to add basically, as Jay alluded to, it's written in the resolution.
The acquired rights mean that whatever change is going to be made will not be retroactive, but it will be forward looking.
Thank you.
Which is how the fund has always done it.
It's made changes, but it's made changes for those who entered the service of the pension after a certain date.
One more question, yes.
Jay, quick question.
There has been a lot of discussion.
Yeah.
Thanks, Jay.
There's been a lot of discussion on the terminology that the General Assembly used.
Was it accrued rights or acquired rights? Because I've been hearing both.
I wouldn't worry about the term.
There is a legal obligation that has arisen as a result of the regulations established.
The United Nations Appeals Tribunal enforces the regulations of the fund.
I think that the General Assembly can't just willy nilly eradicate things.
Now, of course, we'll see what happens, but I think that they understand that those who have served and have worked hard have earned those benefits, whether you call them accrued, acquired, or something that you earned, it's all the same legally speaking.
We have a gentleman in the back and that's the last question because we do have a schedule to continue on with.
Yes, sir.
I was saying that I'm not sure my microphone is working, but I hope you can hear me.
My question is this, I appreciate the goodness of the pension fund.
At times too, let's say within the United States, we hear the Social Security is running out of money.
I don't say it's affecting us, but I'm saying that in your actual calculation, do you take into account that people are living longer and also being kept alive longer? All right.
So I understand you say seven years, but in your actual calculations, do you take this into account? Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So first and foremost, we are using subject matter expert in the actuarial discipline science.
It's a science that actual means to calculate the present value of future disbursement and this present value is calculated exactly by taking into account those element.
Age, inflation, change in demographics, increase in salary and so forth and so on.
It's a science is done by two sets of subject matter experts, the consultant actually and the committee of actually that reviews their methodology.
There is a lot of effort and supervision that goes into that process, I can assure you.
And the pension board reviews all of these elements and sets actuarial assumptions based on input from the committee of actuaries.
These are people that are nationally recognized by their governments for the work they do, and then we have a consulting actuary the fund pays for that and constantly does these updates and analyses, and the board itself through its fund sustainability and assets and liability monitoring committee, looks at these, runs a asset and liability models and studies to do just what you're worried about, which is, how does changes in the fund, how do changes in the number of staff? How do changes in the number of staff that are leaving the organization, all of this.
How does it affect our continued right to benefits and the funds sustainability? It's being monitored daily, I would say.
Well, Dino, thank you very much for, once again, a detailed, comprehensive presentation.
As you can see, there's a lot of interest in this area, and I'm sure they'll continue to be interest.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Let me now welcome I know exactly where we're at.
Mr.
Robert Van See, the representative of the Secretary-General for the investment of the assets of the UNSPS.
Welcome to the Assembly.
It's your first appearance here, and we look forward to your presentation.
Over to you, Robert.
Thank you very much to the Effs Governing Board, to the Ethics membership, and to you, Dasha for this opportunity to speak with you this afternoon.
I know we're running slightly behind schedule.
I'll try to give you some updates beyond what Dino, of course, has already given you as the number of assurances about the fund, and I think Katherine Pollard earlier as well.
I started this new role on the 1st of March, although I did have a temporary assignment before that had the opportunity to engage with the Effs pension Committee back in January and now I have the privilege to present to all of you.
Um, I now leads the Office of Investment Management, about 175 professionals, very talented group of investment professionals, risk operations and finance professionals, and we report directly to the Secretary-General, working very closely with Rosemary and Dino, who report to the pension board.
Let's go to the first slide of this presentation.
Hope you can see this all well.
Here we've outlined the last 35 years 1990-2025 of the developments of the assets under management by our Office for the pension fund.
And it's quite remarkable that in 35 years ago, we were less than $10 billion, and we ended in 2025 at $107.7 billion, an increase from $95.4 billion in the previous year, 13.6% nominal return.
It is sometimes important to look back because, of course, we have seen volatility in financial markets over time, and my colleague will show here that we have three periods of significant drawdowns or downturns that we've seen in financial markets.
First, in 1999, 2000, you remember the.com crisis.
We had significant reduction in market values, but then after three or four years, we recovered by 2023, the previous levels of assets under management.
Of course, 2008, 2007, 2008 showed us the global financial crisis.
Again, we recovered our asset base after four or five years.
More recently, we all remember COVID.
We remember the inflation spike after COVID, which had significant impact in financial markets.
Again, within three years, we recovered the previous level of assets under management.
I think this is important to keep in mind because we will have downturns over time, but we are long term asset owner.
As Dinos mentioned, we effectively manage these funds for intergenerational equity, we call it, or the equity actuaries call it to make sure that not only that we pay your pensions today, but that we pay the future pensions of the future retirees well into the future.
So let us look briefly at the next slide on the composition of the assets that we manage for the pension fund.
As you see in the middle, and it's probably a little bit difficult to see, but we have a strategic asset allocation that comes out of the ALM study that Dina referred to that we did every four years.
So the last time we did an ALM study was in 2023.
And since February 2024, we have an strategic asset allocation of 43% equities, 39% fixed income, and the remainder in what we call private markets, so private equity, real estate, and real assets, and about 1% of cash.
On the right hand side, you see the variances that the investment team has put in place at the end of 2025.
So on the back of very strong public equity markets in recent years, we were overweight by about 1%, 0.9% versus the strategic asset allocation equities.
We are also overweight private equity, which is sort of historic, but the other side of private markets, real estate, which has performed relatively poorly over the last couple of years, we are underweight by 1.6%, as well as in real assets infrastructure where we're starting to invest a little bit more.
We were overweight cash to be conservative.
Of course, we had a number of withdrawal settlements in the UN system because of the UN at 80, but we also have to have cash at hand for commitments we've made in private markets that we need to satisfy when the general partners call on the funds.
If we go to the next slide, then you see the long term performance of the fund, the long term investment performance of the fund.
The primary KPI that is in the compact of myself and my office with the Secretary-General is a long term 15 years real rate of return adjusted for inflation of 3.5%.
We measure that in the actual valuations, we measure that in the ALM study, and that's the rate that is generally required to maintain the financial solvency of the fund.
You see in the table at the bottom, and we have surrounded with a dark blue line the 15 year timeline, which is the measurement that we have, and there you see the real rate of return after correction for inflation of 4.2%.
The target is 3.5% and on all time periods except the five year time buckets, we have outperformed the target.
In the five year time bucket since 2022 included, which was the year after COVID with the spike in inflation where there was poor financial market performance.
The long term rate of return, even on the 50 years, for example, is 5.1%, while the target has generally been 3.5% for the long term.
So quite impressive and particularly as you look in the next slide on the three year performance, we have an average performance over the last three years of 11.9%.
However, on this slide, we show the relative performance that we have against the benchmarks that are set in the ALM study every four years.
You will see here that there's an underperformance, if you look at the three year bucket, that is the measurement for this KPI, underperformance of 1.2%.
And of course, that is an apparent concern that we have.
It is, however, quite easily explainable.
As we showed in the earlier slide, we have about 8% of our investments in private equity.
Private equity our investments on non public market where we invest for five, seven years and then hope to get returns in the future when companies are sold, are listed on stock exchanges or acquired in mergers and acquisitions.
And debt market has not performed badly, has performed a little bit less well than we expected.
The average return over the last three, four years has been five to 6%.
However, we compare the performance with public equities, public market equity performance, and as you all know, the public equity markets have performed very strongly in recent years, particularly also on the back of the AI driven investment boom and the chips manufacturers.
So the comparison versus that public market benchmark is negative.
However, that's something we will have to review.
That's an industry wide problem, and we will review that in the ALM study, but it's not a major concern because as you see, the nominal return has still been 11.3% for the last three years.
Now, let me leave you with a bit of information, but I won't necessarily go into detail unless you have any questions about safeguarding your pension for the future.
The plans of the Office of Investment Management, we have launched a five year strategic plan last year with five strategic goals.
Of course, we have to continue to develop effective and innovative portfolio for the way that we manage that.
The target will, in principle, remain 3.5% real rate of return.
We will review that next year with the pension Board after the completion of the ALM study.
What we will do is move towards what we call a total portfolio approach.
And we are moving away from managing asset classes independently.
So for example, we have a team on equities, we have a team on fixed income, we have a team on private markets.
But there are now more correlations between those investments.
For example, we invest in the magnificent seven, the AI companies in public markets.
We invest in infrastructure for data centers in private markets, and we have some investments in software companies.
There are correlations interrelations between these segments sitting in different teams.
So we'll try to manage the portfolio on a more holistic total portfolio view.
We similar to what Do outlined, we're starting to use Advanced Analytics and AI to keep you sleep at night.
We don't use that for investment decisions.
We use it for investment analysis, maybe over time, but we'll properly inform all the stakeholders.
We will move there.
But for example, of course, a junior analyst that was going through 100 financial statements in a particular sector, an AI agent can now do that probably in 20 minutes and the poor junior analysts would have to do that in three months.
So there are benefits, and we have to leverage those benefits because we are no longer probably in the growth phase as number of headcount at the pension fund.
The pension board would like us to look for efficiencies as well.
So most likely we're going to a steady as you go level of resources because we are still growing.
The assets are still growing.
We have grown, notwithstanding the volatility in financial markets.
We are 5% up here to date.
As you all know from the newspapers, March was a difficult month after the Middle East conflict broke out.
The markets were down by 5%, but April and May have been quite good performance once again in financial markets.
There's no guarantees that will continue for decades.
But as you see for the first slide, we have been able to recover the asset base in the past, and we are very confident that we do this again.
Apart from that, of course, we continue to try to be a leader in responsible investments.
Have reduced our carbon footprint by about 50% since we divested fossil fuels since 2021.
We continue to have the target to reach 60% by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050.
Of course, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve that over time.
The debate in some political environment has changed on the EEG, we stayed the course on responsible investments as we have done under the leadership of the SG, for example, on climate change.
We continue to develop our risk management framework.
We've built up an excellent risk team over time.
We have further to go, but we are confident that we managed the risks, of course, carefully.
For example, with DO analysis, we look at the cybersecurity.
I mean, there was an example.
Cybersecurity is, of course, a very pertinent risk for all of us and we try to manage that with the best possible advice from external parties and as well from best practices within the UN system.
Last but not least, while we are in the investment business, in the end, it's human capital, our 175 odd colleagues that make the machine tick and invest the money and so far, they've done that very well.
I'm just new.
I can't take any credit for that, but it's a pleasure to work with that team at the Office of Investment Management.
I'm here to engage with you and answer your questions on this occasion or any future occasion.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Robert, and I take it that PowerPoint will be made available, and we'll put that on our website as well.
And then of course, you have the key to accessing your website so our members can have a look for themselves at the metrics you have there.
So thank you so much.
If I may, I forgot to mention that and effectively you're doing it.
There's a lot of investment performance information available on the website.
We have weekly, monthly, and of course, annual reports.
So hopefully you'll get the insight you require.
If not, please contact us.
Thank you very much.
Any questions? I see none.
There is one.
Yes, sir.
You need to press the white button.
Not that white button.
There you go.
Hang on.
Wait until it turns red.
There you go.
With the involvement of the General Assembly in our business, could be a possibility to get involved in the investments of the fund, take the authority that we have now and take cover it, something like that.
The Office of Investment Management reports directly to the Secretary-General and that is done for historic but obvious reasons to limit the influence of too many stakeholders of the fund on the investment management because it needs to be a dedicated profession and of course, we take guidance from the General Assembly, but we hope that the General Assembly would never step in to make more concrete investment decisions.
For example, what the General Assembly has given us as guidance is further diversification in asset classes and geographies.
And that we do impact investments where we can do that with respecting the investment principles, including security and return.
So, for example, we've built up an impact investment portfolio of 1.9 billion out of the 112 billion today, we do that with long term financial returns in mind.
We may give up some short term liquidity, but the long term financial returns opportunity needs to be there.
So we of course, need to ensure that we manage the funds for the long term liabilities that we have as a pension fund.
If I may just add to that, there are two important articles in the regulations of the fund.
The first Gerry Barton alluded to is Article 18, was 14 when it first was enacted.
Article 18 says that the assets of the pension fund are solely to be used for the beneficiaries and participants of the fund.
That's it.
It can't be used for any other purpose.
The second thing that the General Assembly did, and this is Article 19 of the fund as Robert just mentioned, was to give management of those assets to the Secretary-General who can go above the fray as it were, and they have recognized that he is a fiduciary for the participants and beneficiaries of the fund with respect to those assets.
Robert works with the Secretary-General.
This insulates the investments from meddling by the member states other than, as you said, on these broad categories.
Thank you very much.
I'm also a 20 year active participants of the fund, so I had the pleasure to work at the World Food Program for a long time in my career after I was a banker and a treasurer, so happy to be aligned to the interest of all the other active participants in retirees.
Thank you very much.
Robert, thank you for a great presentation, succinctly and yet hit all the key facts.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Now I'd like to welcome miss Vera Raji, officer in charge of UN Health and Life Insurance section, and miss Julie Bohr, communications officer in the Health and Life Insurance section.
Miss Bohr will be presenting remotely through MS Teams from Belgium.
So let's start with Vera.
Vera.
Welcome to the assembly in a different capacity.
Indeed, thank you so much, Dar.
Lovely to have you here.
P.
The floor is yours.
Good afternoon, friends and former colleagues.
It's a pleasure to be here today along with Julie Bri, who is with us virtually to update you on health insurance plans.
Of interest to note that ASHE subscribers now represent about 30% of the total number of enrollees in all of our plans across all the five plans that we have.
MIP is now included in our plan, so between Aetna Anthem, the Cigna Dental, the Worldwide Plan, and MIP, ASH representatives our chief participants are 30%.
This means that it is important for you to be knowledgeable consumers of health care.
As such, Julie will be presenting an overview of our plans, both on how the plans are performing and what each of us can do to help control costs.
As the choices we make as plan participants can make a very big difference in those costs.
That said, I know we're behind time, so I give it over to you, Julie.
Take over, please.
Julie, just to point out, we are behind time.
So if you could try to wrap up in the next 10 minutes, if that's possible.
Thank you so much.
Sorry to push you to that extreme.
Julie, over to you? I think you may have to unmute her mic.
We hear you, Julie.
No problem.
I'll try to run through the slides as fast as possible.
Once again, also from my side, you cannot hear me? We hear you fine.
I am.
We can hear you.
Julie.
I am talking.
We can hear you.
Yeah.
We can you hear me.
Perfect.
Yes, we hear you well.
Also from my side, good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
I'm going to share with you some of the updates, not the changes that will be in effect in July because we cannot yet announce them, but I think it's already important following also Vera's very kind introduction to just highlight some of the trends that we've been seeing in our plans, the drivers of those costs, how we can all help contain costs.
Then I think even maybe most importantly, there's going to be a kind invitation to some of the events that we will be organizing as health and life insurance section, both online or virtual webinars to inform everyone, both staff members and retirees of the upcoming plan changes for the new year effective July 1st, as well as an in person events that we will be having on June 11th in the lobby of the Secretariat.
First of all, if we look at the performance of our health insurance plans, it's not looking well, meaning that we're looking now at loss ratios.
In health insurance, the loss ratio is the total program cost which is compiled of the claims costs and the administrative fees.
When we divide that by the total premiums that we collect, premiums is a composition of the subscribers contributions as ASH participants as well as the staff members, and then the organization subsidy, we want to see a percentage that is below 100, which indicates that there are some reserves, and there's some margin.
Unfortunately, you will see here from this slide that a combination of different drivers have led to in last year's loss ratios, even in the last year loss ratios on all of our plans exceeding 100%.
All of our plans are these five plans that you see here, the Aetna Plan, Anthem Plan, Cigna Dental PPO, the UN Worldwide Plan and our UN medical insurance plan.
Medical insurance plan, it's a new plan that we added this year.
It's not a new plan, but a new plan that we added to the presentation, which provides adequate coverage to our locally recruited staff members and former staff members outside the United States.
So what I just described, you'll find it here in a couple of bullet points.
Meaning this means the fact that we have loss ratios beyond 100%, that we're looking at premium rate increases for all of our UNHQ administered health insurance plans in July 2026.
The key drivers of the UN claims experience are to start with the medical inflation.
Medical inflation has always been or definitely in the last years has been much higher than the overall global inflation.
It's driven by a couple of indicators, the new technologies that come to market, robotic surgeries, for instance, specialty medications, many different factors that drive the medical inflation has been a two digit number now for a couple of years.
The workforce shortages in the sector have also leading to higher costs, workforce costs, and then we have the infrastructure expenses that are increasing.
On top of that, in our plans, we have both a maturing as well as aging population.
As Var already mentioned, around one third of our membership are retirees, but we also have the maturing population, meaning that we have we have fewer new staff members joining and new staff members are typically less mature staff members that don't know how to utilize the plan yet.
So in the first years, they will typically claim less.
Now with the current situation, we have much more maturing plan participants or mature plan participants who very well know how to use the plants.
Rising drug costs without having generic equivalents available for many of them is also a huge driver of costs.
You will all have heard of GLP one medications, for instance, which is one of the drugs that drives costs.
Um, post COVID rebounds, we're obviously back to the post COVID situation.
People are going to seek their health care again.
But unfortunately, during the COVID periods, many people did not seek care, did not have their screenings done.
There was a lot of deferred care and the diagnosis were more severe, were delayed and conditions are more severe.
More severe conditions means more costly treatments, and we truly see that in our plans in all of our plans and most in the Aetna plan.
Use of out of network providers, we try to do a lot of steward through our communication efforts.
There's many different benefits for seeking care in the network, mostly also from a financial standpoint but also from a member experience standpoint.
We truly try to incentivize everyone to seek health care in the in the networks of the third party administrators to contain costs and also lower your coin emergency rooms should only be visited for non emergency issues.
We for emergency issues, sorry, we still see them being visited for non emergency issues too often.
Of course, there we urge members to go to urgent care centers or to a general practitioner if it's not an emergency U Then under utilization of preventive services, ideally, we want to see 100% of members seeking 100% of the preventive services available to them, back to the point that we want to avoid any delayed diagnosis, both for medical care as well as for dental care, but also for dental care, we see a low amount a high amount of members that are not having their cleanings done.
Even there, we truly want to incentivize members to have their preventive services scheduled and performed.
And chronic conditions and mental health issues are ramping.
Many more people are suffering from chronic conditions and mental health issues for longer periods, longer requirements of admissions, length of stay, more severe, again, treatments.
Of course, this is something that is also related to the aging of populations as well as the availability and access to mental health care, which luckily also during the pandemic, there was some awareness created with regards to accessing mental health care.
Now, how can we all take action as participants of the plans? Of course, they're all linked to the drivers of costs.
We can use in network of providers, prioritize preventive care, utilize available nurse case management there as well.
We have a lot of high cost files, more and more because of the reasons that I just explained.
All of the third party administrators have programs in place, nurse case management programs where a nurse can free of charge, follow you through your medical or clinical journey.
Provide advice both on cost as well as care.
So we truly want to emphasize that these programs exist and that members can avail of them free of charge.
Avoid ER visits for non emergency care because they cost more than regular urgent care center visits.
Then we still have all of our telehealth services available on all of our different plans.
Costs with us, especially also, for instance, if you want a second medical opinion or you want to get some additional guidance on an upcoming treatment, we very much like these services that are available to all members.
Then of course, a very important one, especially for this audience.
In 2011, we implemented Medicare Part B enrollment.
We made it mandatory for those who are eligible.
It is a huge cost saver.
It saves us much more.
Then it costs us, right? So we made it mandatory.
If you are eligible for Medicare Part B and you are not yet enrolled or you know anyone, please talk to them because we have to ensure that everyone who's enrolled in who's eligible for Medicare Part B is also enrolled in the program.
Ask to review plan documents and updates again to become knowledgeable consumers.
It helps all of us as plan participants, and therefore also thank you very much for still listening to this session.
We very much appreciate it because it is important to reach our plan participants directly.
Obtain pre certification for upcoming treatments when required.
And then opt for generic medications when available.
Go back to some of the specialty drugs that do not yet have these generic medications available.
They will come to market at some point and we will of course as well encourage through our plan design to have generic medications prescribed.
Lastly, of course, prevent fraud, waste, and abuse.
You can see many different ways, but the easiest starting point is to review your explanation of benefits when you receive it review whether indeed the care that was cleaned was paid, was care that was actually provided to you, and if not, contact the third party administrator.
Brings me to the last slide.
Leave that on the screen screen and we'll ask you to just cut there.
If there are any questions.
Can I still talk or 30 seconds.
Go ahead.
Can I still go over it? 30 seconds.
You have 30 seconds.
We're running out of time and we'll be cut off at six, so Yeah.
Okay.
We'll stop there.
If there are any questions for AS, I would ask that you mail those in.
There's A at un.org.
You can write to them directly if you have specific questions about your coverage.
Of course, we continue to monitor the health and life situation with doctor Nerua, but we do have to move on.
Hear me.
We thank you both.
Julie, thank you so much for your patience today and for your presentation and Vera, thank you so much.
Thank you, Vera and Julie Core.
Are you going to speak with doctor Mia? No.
He's going to.
Yes.
Okay.
So I'd like to now hand over the floor to doctor Nerula.
There's a slight change in the timetable, the order, and she's going to provide you an update on the nominations.
Over to you, doctor Nulla.
And then I hope we have time to do the website.
Hey, okay.
Good afternoon to all the worldwide ethics New York members.
As you know, Effs New York conducts its governing board elections through its nominating committee, designated by the president and I am Susan Neurula once again, one of the co chairs of this committee.
The 2026 nominating committee is comprised of four members, is co chaired by Furio D Tomasi and me, and other two members are Jay Kara and Andy Ne.
By way of background, please note that since 2021 and as approved by the governing board, Our associations nominating committee has been conducting hybrid elections with the help of election services company, and an online election company.
But in 2026, the board has decided that the Governing Board elections now and such elections in future will only be carried out by electronic voting only.
For those members who don't have access to email but have access to computer and the Internet, we also arranged a way for them to access the voting site and they were all informed by a letter sent to each one of them by the nominating committee.
ESE is specialized company completely independent of the New York, tasked with conducting its own the electronic voting process.
Therefore, in this connection, this year's ballots were sent to you via email by them and also your ballots that you cast also went directly to them.
And before that, notification was sent by us to all of you about the governing board election process and alerts you how you are going to get the ballots.
But the election package containing nominated buyers ballots and the voting instruction that was sent by them to you, that was all prepared by us, the nominating committee.
They were only responsible for distribution and managing the entire voting process.
And here now, I am going to announce the results of 11 candidates who got the most number of votes.
Let me tell you, this is the first time everybody is hearing.
We got the results two days ago and even President Azo, nobody knows, and this is the first time everybody is going to hear the results.
When I announce and if you're here, please stand up so that people who voted for you can see who you are.
I start in alphabetical order, the same order on which they were listed on the ballot.
Start with Nicholas Alipoy, Ryu, Bhatia, Robin Dell Rocca, Pillar, Frons Conte, Ingrid Casper.
No, Marita Lagaspi.
Regina Pollack, Posnll J, Christine Roth, Golden Turquoise Coslet and last Elma Witherspoon.
Congratulations to all of you and we look forward to working with you.
Thank you.
Thank you, doctor De Rula.
And we're running out of time, so I'm going to jump straight to the website, but while they get themselves ready, congratulations to all the people who got this maximum number of votes.
We look forward to working with you on the board.
Gail, over to you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Dashak and in the interest of time and wanting you to see what the new website looks like, I'm going to be very short on this introduction.
In the spring of 2022, Affix, New York, through its newly formed ad hoc communications committee, undertook a survey of our membership, followed by a series of focus groups.
Before developing a communication strategy for the association, we wanted first to understand how members receive information and whether that information was useful, relevant, and accessible.
One of the central questions we asked was, what is your primary source of information about Affix, New York, and how effective is that source in meeting your needs? The responses made one thing very clear, while our website remained the principal source of information for members, it no longer fully met the expectations of today's retirees.
Members told us that the site was difficult to navigate, that the layout was not intuitive, and that it did not encourage visitors to return regularly.
Many also felt the site was too text heavy and not sufficiently reflect the vibrancy and diversity of our membership.
With that feedback in mind, we began planning a redesign of the website.
What we did not realize was the number of challenges we would encounter along the way.
The first and largest challenge was financial.
We knew we would receive technical assistance and and the initial quotations we received were far beyond anything the association could reasonably afford.
This led us into an extended period of research and exploration as we tried to identify solutions that balanced functionality, sustainability, and cost.
At the same time, we learned during discussions with the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology, that the UN, which had generously hosted our website for many years, had upgraded its hosting systems while supporting hundreds of websites across the organization.
Although they were willing to continue assisting us, the ongoing cost of upgrading and maintaining our platform would have significantly exceeded of financial means.
We were also advised that while our existing arrangement might be temporarily extended as a courtesy, we should begin preparing to migrate to a new platform by the end of 2025.
As a result, much of 2024 and 2025 was spent researching alternatives and testing more affordable approaches.
During that period, we also have 5 minutes.
Okay.
I'm going to give you that.
So during that time, we worked with a young technical consultant who helped us establish the initial framework for what would become our new website.
Then earlier this year, recognizing both our financial limitations and the need for greater flexibility, we explored additional options, drawing in part on advice received from OICT One of our members began experimenting with the Wicks platform, and that's what we want to show you now, what we have managed to come up with.
I'm going to ask Andy, who is a vice chair of the communications committee to walk you through the new website.
Thank you very much, Gail.
If anyone has their smartphone, you can zap the QR code and it will take you straight to the website.
Can we go to the next slide? Thank you.
Yes.
Since it's not in the UN IT infrastructure, we've been able to adopt a different style, so we're not bound to the UN standard.
It's still a work in progress, so you will see changes appear, not necessarily on a daily basis, but quite frequently.
It looks quite different on a mobile phone than it does on desktop, of course.
The top navigation bar is the best guide to where the content is to be found.
Just scrolling down next slide, please.
Scrolling down next slide.
Yeah.
The homepage, there's an area immediately on the right for latest announcements.
Next slide, please.
Further down, you'll find an overview of main sections of the site.
This is a narrative article that walks you through what the sections what they have.
On the right hand side, there's an area of news from FAFx.
The next slide, please.
Further down, there's the in memorium area.
And this is a preview of the main memrium page, which is elsewhere on the side under the community section.
Next slide, please.
Immediately below that, we have a preview of upcoming events, and on the right hand side, you'll see back to top.
It's a little link.
You'll see that on the right hand side throughout the mobile version, and that's actually it'll take you straight back to the top of the current page that you're currently on.
Next slide, please.
Going across the main menu, the A us section gives an overview.
It explains our mission, who we are, how were governed, the elections process, the leadership.
The next slide, please.
Next one over is a section dedicated to membership.
It explains why and how to join the different types of membership available.
Then at the bottom of that section, we created a single page that explains how to make payments to Aff, New York.
Currently, there are three methods.
It's transfer UNFCU member to member transfer.
Once you've set that up, it's actually very, very easy to do.
Um, by check or in cash.
We're also testing a fourth method using a website called Zepy, which is designed for non profits.
I should also mention that the Wes platform has a tailor made solution for member associations, which is why we chose this platform.
Next slide, please.
Services is the area where our covers our main substantial areas of activity, so pension, health insurance, the charities Foundation.
Next slide, please.
Resources area, this is where you'll find most information.
It's a fairly long list, but it's where you'll find u everything that's listed.
I don't have time to walk you through it.
Further across to the right is the community section.
This carries the latest announcements in full, upcoming events and further to the right, there's an area of galleries.
The gallery is photos of previous events.
On the extreme right, you'll find how to contact us.
The footer repeats all the contact information.
On the last slide, please, we're calling for volunteers to assist in a focus group to actually We ask some structured questions or we will ask some structured questions to get your feedback on the site how you experienced the site.
So if you follow the QR code on the top left hand corner, that'll take you to an article 0N the site which explains how you can sign up.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Andy.
I encourage you all to visit the website.
Starch.
In not having much time, I just want to thank the work that has been done by Gail and Andy and the rest of the group for developing this website.
Still work in progress.
Great amount of work has gone into it and so a big thanks.
Before we get cut off, I just want to make sure I remind you, we have a reception which is in the visitors area right next to the bookshop.
Please, if you're paid, do come, it'll be an opportunity for you to meet some of the presenters and also meet with the rest of the board members of Ethics, New York.
I want to make sure I don't forget one thing which is extremely important.
George Sadler passed away a few months ago.
Mr.
Sadler was one of the earlier presidents of Effs, New York.
Fathics was founded after Ethics, New York, and then he also took on the role of president of fathics.
In both the roles, he displayed compassion, persistence, and ability to drive his vision.
All the new leaders of both these organizations sit on the shoulders of this great man.
So I would have liked to observe a minute of silence, but I don't think that we don't have the time for that, we are doing it in our mind.
So what I would like to now say just thank all the presenters, thank all of you for attending this meeting.
Thank all those who have attended the meeting virtually and close by one quote which I think is wonderful.
The United Nations is our conscience.
Could the world forgive itself if it did not have a conscience? Thank you.
Just to remind you, the reception will be in the visitors lobby where the cafe is and the bookstore and so forth.
So if you work your way down.
And Mac will make the finance presentation available on the website.
All right.
Thank you all.
Visitors lobby area where the bookstore is is where we will have our reception.
You're all invited.
Thank you.
Yeah.