The World Bank Treasury manages the World Bank's finances to enable all operations and lending, acts as a trusted advisor to our member countries to support financial stability and resilience, and leads financial innovation to implement the Maximizing Finance for Development agenda. Treasury has three departments and one risk and controls team.
The Asset Management & Advisory Department provides capacity-building services to public sector asset managers, including central banks, international financial institutions, public pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds, under the Reserve Advisory & Management Partnership (RAMP). The department is the liquidity and asset manager for RAMP clients, trust funds, and other external clients with over $70 billion AUM. It also supports over 30 technical workshops and thought leadership conferences each year, in addition to authoring original, leading publications on asset management.
The Capital Markets & Investments Department is responsible for issuing World Bank bonds in the international capital markets to finance projects World Bank member countries. Treasury borrows over $60 billion annually and issued in over 70 currencies, and oversees asset and liability management for IBRD and IDA, with over $150 billion AUM. Treasury also works with clients on risk management transactions, and contributes to the World Bank development through innovative financing, risk management solutions, green bonds, and disaster risk management tools like catastrophe bonds.
The Department is responsible for the financial management and administration of the World Bank Group's funded benefit plans (the 'Plans'), including the retirement scheme, the retiree medical and life insurance programs, and other ancillary benefits, covering more than 28,000 participants (17,000 active and 11,000 retirees). PEN oversees investment management and benefits administration, and manages about $40 billion US dollars invested across a range of asset classes, from fixed income to public equities to private equity, real assets, credit strategies and absolute return strategies.
The Treasury Operations Department acts as the bank for the World Bank Group by supporting business units with payments, receipts, foreign exchange and cash management needs. TRE is responsible for establishing and managing all bank account relationships, routing details and settlement instructions and is also responsible for the reconciliation, investigations and cash accounting for the World Bank’s cash flows—totaling over $7 trillion each year.
The team manages the investment products for external clients and trust funds within investment guidelines and overall compliance requirements. The team is responsible for achieving competitive returns for all mandates, with prudent management of associated risks. They also achieve competitive excess return over the investment benchmarks of the investment mandates through effective design of investment strategies across various asset classes.
The team is responsible for administering the RAMP program, including developing project plans and leading capacity-building activities for official sector asset managers on all aspects of asset management. Engagement managers design, budget, implement and evaluate an annual engagement plan and deliver and coordinate advisory services to RAMP clients. The team leads business strategy and outreach to prospective clients for the RAMP program and external asset management services.
The team is responsible for delivering advisory, expertise and training to RAMP clients. Subject matter experts produce notes, working papers and applied research on asset management to support clients and contribute to the public asset management community. The team also leads and coordinates the development of investment products and provides analytical support to the asset management team. In addition, the team implements the technical training program, including workshops, webinars and internships.
The team is responsible for analytics, monitoring, and policy formulations for activities that impact IBRD and IDA’s balance sheets. The team formulates policies, guidelines, and processes that impact the financial risk and income of IBRD and IDA. The team also provides liquidity calculation and reporting and analysis for rating agencies.
The team is responsible for raising long and short-term funding in the global capital markets for both IBRD and IDA. The goal is to achieve funding on a sustainable basis and at the best possible cost through a variety of programs, markets, currencies, and instruments including both plain vanilla and structured notes. The team also executes $100 billion notional swaps to hedge issuances.
The team helps clients find solutions for their development financing and risk management needs leveraging IBRD and IDA’s financial products and TRE’s financial expertise and market access. It provides support for IBRD and IDA operations and clients on the full menu of financial and risk management products, pricing and loan customization, blending and co-financing, IDA to IBRD transition, and thematic bond issuance strategies and reporting, among other areas.
The team manages funds raised for lending activities of IBRD and IDA, by investing the funds in high-grade assets. The main objectives are principal protection and ensuring sufficient cash flow to meet IBRD’s and IDA’s financial commitments. The team also seeks a reasonable return to contribute to net income.
The team cultivates, maintains and strengthens investor, rating agency and financial media relationships for IBRD, IDA and IFFIm to help achieve TRECI’s funding goals. The team manages outreach activities to contribute to the World Bank’s development mandate and build sustainable capital markets. They engage investors and market participants on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.
The team designs and executes market-based risk management and structured transactions for external and internal clients and provides structuring expertise and advisory services to address development challenges.
The Treasury Asset & Liability Operations team (TREAL) is responsible for supporting more than $ 300 billion and 500 billion in outstanding debt and derivatives transactions over their life cycle respectively for the IBRD, IDA, and more than 60 client portfolios. The team manages relationships with clients, broker dealers, custodians, agents, market counterparts, and technology vendors. In addition to managing the day-to-day operations, TREAL staff lead the research, coordination, and implementation of new products and markets across Treasury. The team has a heavy focus on, and takes a leadership role in, evaluating and deploying the latest products and technologies (core trading platforms and new initiatives and technologies like CBDC, blockchain, AI, robotics, etc.) to create efficiencies, reduce risk, and advance thought leadership amongst WB’s peers and clients. TREAL staff recently co-led projects where the World Bank issued innovative digital bonds using blockchain technology and CBDC. In recognition of their efforts to advance capital markets and asset management, the TREAL team received several industry awards including for “Innovation in Reserves Management” (2021) and “Asset Servicing Initiative of the year” (2023).
The team provides all banking and payments services for the World Bank Group (WBG). The unit manages the SWIFT connection to the external financial system, the institution’s central cash management system, including its integration with all WBG teams and systems which originate or receive cash flows, and manages and reconciles all WBG bank accounts. The team works closely with internal partners and market counterparts as well as external service providers such as technology vendors, banks, and paying agents. The team also facilitates the implementation of new products, markets, and business-related technology solutions.
The team coordinates the efficient internal administration of World Bank Treasury’s Information Technology infrastructure across all institutional, project, maintenance, budget and planning cycles, ensuring it remains fit for purpose, up-to-date, and secure and reliable. The team also develops and maintain appropriate strategic technology planning in relation to Treasury’s significant standing in the global financial markets and leverages that standing to build internal and external partnerships for market and development effect.
The team is the focal point of quantitative, analytical and reporting support for the fixed income asset management business. The team develops and implements quantitative models, financial solutions and portfolio analytics. They support financial accounting, investment performance measurement, investment guideline compliance monitoring for internal and external clients, as well as related capacity building for central banks, sovereign wealth & pension funds, office of debt management & strategic partners.
The Pension & Endowments Department (PEN) reports directly to the Vice President & Treasurer, the Pension Finance Administrator.
The Pension and Endowments Department (PEN) is responsible for the financial management and administration of the World Bank Group's funded benefit plans (the ‘Plans’), including the retirement scheme - the Staff Retirement Plan, the retiree medical and life insurance programs - the Retired Staff Benefits Plan, and other ancillary benefits. Under the oversight of two governing bodies, the Pension Finance Committee (PFC) and the Pension Benefits Administration Committee (PBAC), PEN oversees investment management and benefits administration. The Plans funding comes from: contributions from staff, contributions from the WBG, and the assets and returns from the Plans portfolios. There are currently, more than 28,000 participants (17,000 active and 11,000 retirees) covered by the Plans. The financial management includes asset management responsibilities and actuarial support. PEN manages about $40 billion US dollars invested across a range of asset classes, from fixed income to public equities to private equity, real assets, credit strategies and absolute return strategies.
The Pension Middle Office team (PENMO) under PEN is responsible for providing a full range of functions supporting these investment activities, including the following: i) pension performance and attribution reporting, ii) pension financial reporting, iii) operational activities (such as tax reclaim, ESG reporting, internal trading, vendor monitoring etc.) support, iv) monitoring asset class exposures, v) private investments (private equity, private real estate, hedge fund) administration, vi) all investment asset pricing and valuation, vii) capacity building for RAMP clients. PENMO staff are co-located in both Washington DC headquarters and Chennai, India. Staff regularly interacts and coordinates with internal (Investment team, legal, HR) and external (managers, auditors, custodians, brokers etc.) teams. PENMO is currently focused on efficiency and automation to minimize operational risk. The team uses different tools such as Microsoft Business Intelligence interactive dashboard, Oracle database, Python, Macro, Power Query, Power Automate to enhance productivity.
16. Treasury Risk, Compliance and Controls (TRERC) team's mission is to enable and improve operational effectiveness across all Treasury business lines. TRERC work program is focused on mitigating Operational Risk, ensuring a robust control framework for TRE processes as part of the Internal Controls over Financial Reporting (ICFR) Program and asset management activities for external clients under the Service Organization Controls (SOC 1) Reporting; managing Treasury Business Continuity Program and Access Control framework for Treasury IT applications; supporting Treasury IT Investment Program, as well as maintaining the inventory of Treasury business processes and promoting best practices in Data Governance.
