Who manages the funds?
When you become a USS member, you start building your pension with us. But who’s actually looking after your money and deciding where to invest? The answer is USS Investment Management Limited (USSIM). They’re appointed by us to be our investment manager. And together, we have a duty of care to invest your contributions for you.
Investments with you in mind
We make investments with long-term investment goals in mind. That’s because we have a legal duty to invest in the best financial interests of our members, so that we’re able to pay you the pension you’ve earned.
Find out more about where we invest.
The investment gurus
Our in-house investment team invests in both public and private markets, giving them a global reach. They manage around 68% of the Scheme’s assets across both the Retirement Income Builder (the defined benefit part) and the Investment Builder (the defined contribution part).
They also select and monitor a range of external investment managers. That means there are specialists managing your contributions. These investment experts can adapt to the ever-changing markets — and help towards a more secure financial future for you.
How we measure success
To help us measure how well we’re doing, we use what’s called an investment balanced scorecard, which covers six important categories. Each category includes a set of measures that the Trustee Board’s Investment Committee uses to assess our investment performance more holistically.
There is a scorecard for both the Retirement Income Builder and the Investment Builder. Each one uses the same six categories but with slightly different metrics. These metrics include a range of quantitative risk and return metrics, and qualitative inputs. The purpose of the scorecards is to take a balanced view of performance against the backdrop of our investment objectives and the interests of our members and employers.
The categories include the return on our assets, the way investment risk is managed, the value our in-house investment team add by actively managing our assets, the quality of investment advice, how resilient our investment portfolio is, and our responsible investment ambitions.
Investment balanced scorecard categories:
To see how we’ve performed against this scorecard visit our investment performance.
We also closely monitor our investment management costs. These were are approximately £102m lower in the calendar year 2024 than the median global peer pension fund, according to the most recent independent analysis by CEM Benchmarking. This demonstrates the value our in-house investment team provide.
Whilst there are costs associated with having an in-house investment team, they’re significantly lower than what we would otherwise have to pay external managers to oversee our specific portfolio — and we have achieved strong relative returns over the long-term in a cost-effective way. Over the five years to the end of 2024, our investment management costs were £485m lower than the peer median.
Making responsible investments
We’re a long-term, responsible investor with a legal duty to invest in your best financial interests, so we can pay our members’ pensions long into the future. We believe that when a company is run effectively, and appropriately manages its environmental and social risks, like climate change, investment risk can be reduced over time and returns may be positively impacted.
That’s why we work hard to assess how our investments manage these factors through our stewardship activities to encourage improved management and disclosure.
Find out more about responsible investment.
Cut through the investment jargon with our handy investment glossary.