United Services Automobile Association Pension Plan (USAA)

The pension's investment team operates within USAA's corporate treasury function, reporting through the chief financial officer to the board of directors' investment committee. Day-to-day portfolio management is handled by an internal team of investment professionals who source, diligence, and monitor external fund commitments and direct co-investments. The board committee holds ultimate fiduciary authority over asset-allocation targets and manager selection. CEO Juan C. Andrade, appointed in 2025, oversees the broader enterprise but the pension's committee structure means investment decisions are collective rather than single-operator.

The pension plan is a legally distinct defined-benefit trust that holds assets exclusively for participant retirement obligations. USAA's general account — which backs property-casualty and life insurance policies — is a separate pool of roughly $200 billion in member premiums, float, and banking deposits, governed by insurance regulators and Federal Home Loan Bank requirements. The pension runs its own liability-driven investment policy, does not backstop the insurance side, and does not invest in USAA member auto loans or insurance-linked securities.

USAA Real Estate originated as the in-house real estate investment arm managing the pension plan's property commitments, but it evolved into a third-party manager serving external institutional investors. In a strategic transaction, USAA Real Estate combined with Square Mile Capital to form Affinius Capital, though legacy ties and property co-ownership persist. The pension plan continues to allocate to real estate strategies, including through Affinius-managed vehicles and direct commercial-property holdings, but governance now operates at arm's length.

The plan uses a blend of fund commitments and direct co-investments, weighted toward external managers for primary private-markets exposure. The legacy real estate portfolio includes direct holdings in commercial properties such as the USAA headquarters campus and multi-tenant office towers in Chicago and Miami, but the current posture favors fund commitments for buyout, infrastructure, and private credit allocations. Direct deals occur in real estate where the plan retains operational familiarity from the USAA Real Estate lineage.

The plan does not publicly disclose exclusion screens, but as a fiduciary for military-family retirement assets, its investment policy is unlikely to include strategies with significant reputational risk or extreme volatility that misaligns with liability-matching objectives. Venture capital, cryptocurrency, and highly levered hedge fund strategies with short-duration liquidity profiles are absent from typical corporate defined-benefit portfolios of this scale. The plan also avoids conflicted transactions with USAA's insurance or banking operations to maintain ERISA compliance.

USAA's cooperative ownership means the pension lacks the external equity-analyst pressure or public quarterly earnings cycle that shapes public-company pension governance. Investment committee members are accountable to USAA's member base, not outside shareholders, which can extend the time horizon for illiquid commitments. However, the cooperative's capital reserves are finite — USAA cannot issue public equity to shore up underfunded pension liabilities — creating a conservative bias in contribution policy and asset-allocation risk budgets that differs from a Fortune 500 corporate plan.

The plan has not publicly marketed a co-investment platform or allocated a specific co-investment vehicle, unlike large Canadian pensions or sovereign funds that actively solicit co-invest opportunities. However, for real estate and infrastructure commitments where the plan's internal team has direct asset-level expertise — particularly in North American commercial property — it has historically participated in direct positions alongside external managers. The absence of a dedicated co-investment program reflects the plan's relatively lean internal team size rather than a strategic prohibition.