Analyst, Actuary

OUR COMPANY BACKGROUND & CULTURE
UPP is the first pension plan of its kind in Ontario’s university sector, proudly serving over 41,000 members across five universities and fourteen sector organizations. Our purpose is to bring greater retirement peace of mind to the university sector by investing with integrity and serving members with care. As a sector-wide plan designed for growth, our doors are open to all Ontario universities.
Together, we’re a team of progressive thinkers and agile doers operating within a fast-paced culture of collaboration and respect. We believe in bringing smart and capable people together to create, solve, and grow with a clear shared vision and values of integrity, inclusivity, ingenuity, and impact. Our culture is intentionally welcoming and purposefully rooted in equity, diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation (EDI&R). We believe diverse teams, perspectives, and lived experiences contribute to better decisions and a better workplace.
As a pension plan, UPP approaches investing through a long-term lens to generate and safeguard value. Our commitment to investing responsibly accounts for material risks that impact our investment portfolio to generate sufficient risk-adjusted returns to meet the pension needs of our members.
Join us in building a bright future for our members, our organization, and each other.
THE ROLE
Reporting directly to the Manager, Actuary, the Analyst, Actuary will assist with wide-ranging actuarial tasks at UPP, from preparing strategic presentations to developing detailed actuarial models. The Analyst, Actuary will directly support the Manager, Actuary on various projects including UPP’s Active Outreach and Onboarding teams, risk appetite and strategic asset liability management (ALM) studies, Pension Services requests, actuarial analysis to set the plan discount rate and other valuation assumptions, preparing Board and Investment Committee presentations and other special requests. The Analyst, Actuary will regularly communicate with various internal teams (within the Investment Team, Engagement and Outreach, Pension Services, and Corporate Finance), as well as with external parties such as actuarial consulting firms, regulators, lawyers, and other stakeholders. Given UPP’s “start-up” atmosphere, there is room to make significant impact on the actuarial team and on the overall fund. There are numerous opportunities to take ownership of projects from inception to completion in this role.
This role is based in downtown Toronto under a hybrid work policy, allowing employees the flexibility to work remotely and in-office (approximately two days per week in-office).
SPECIFIC ACCOUNTABILITIES
The Analyst, Actuary will be responsible for a variety of duties, including but not limited to the following:

- Providing Actuarial Support to UPP’s Outreach and Onboarding Teams: Preparing actuarial analysis as requested from time to time by UPP’s Active Engagement and Onboarding Teams. This includes preparing side-by-side comparisons of pension plan provisions of universities interested in joining UPP, preparing member accrued pension comparison graphs, preparing illustrative defined contribution to defined benefit pension calculations, performing funded status projections for interested universities, and helping with any inquiries from the Outreach Teams regarding UPP plan funding, risk management, or pension legislation.
- Asset Liability Management (ALM) Studies: Updating, if needed, member details, plan provisions, assumptions, and asset information in UPP’s asset-liability management system to produce analysis that helps the ALM team understand the plan’s investment and funding risks. Producing graphs and charts summarizing results of the ALM studies. Supporting risk appetite and risk management initiatives between the Actuary team and Investment team.
- Providing Actuarial Support to Pension Services: Interpreting plan provisions to develop tools to verify pension benefit calculations and pension projection calculations and testing the tools to ensure quality and accuracy of administrative calculations. Performing pension administration calculations that are of a special or complex nature (family law, pre-retirement death, or other complex/infrequent type calculations).
- Presentation Development: Preparing presentation materials for UPP’s Investment Committee, Board, or Joint Sponsors on a variety of actuarial and ALM topics (such as discount rate, other actuarial assumptions and methods, actuarial valuation results, economic scenario generators, key investment risk measures and other actuarial or investment studies as required from time to time).
- Peer Plan Analysis: Preparing and maintaining repositories of key information of peer pension plans
- Valuation Assumption Setting: Researching and benchmarking economic and demographic assumptions using capital market assumptions from the UPP investment team, CIA/SOA studies, and industry data.
- Supporting Corporate