Vanguard收购数字财富平台Altruist，CEO谈交易与战略

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Vanguard is buying digital wealth platform Altruist. The deal marks Vanguard's intensifying push into wealth management. And you might remember Altruist back in February. It sparked a sell-off in wealth management stocks after launching a tool aimed at creating tax strategies. So pleased to say that. Joining us is Vanguard CEO Salem Ramji and Altra CEO Jason Wank in an exclusive interview.

Thank you both so much for joining. Jason, do you do you enjoy the notoriety you you still have for making all of your peers sell off? Like this is this is a really exciting deal. And and Seem, if I can start with you cuz this is this is a departure from Vanguard. You're known for growing organically.

Why not go that method in expanding into wealth? Why does it make sense for altruists who you've already partnered with to outright buy it?

You know, we've been an investor in Altruist going back uh uh more than half a dozen years. So, we were a minority investor kind of in the early days when Jason and his team were first getting started. And what we were impressed back then um about is what we're also impressed about today. Uh the first piece was really uh the mission um that Jason had founded the firm around which is making advice more accessible, more affordable, and better um for many more Americans.

Uh and the second piece which is really takes us to today is just the tenacity with which Jason and the team have really been building their business. And from a Vanguard perspective uh we want to do for financial advice um what we've done for the past 50 years um for investments which is really make it much more accessible to many more people. Uh and uh and part of this alignment around the mission, right, when Jason was talking about the mission of Ultra is to me and we were and and we were comparing notes.

Uh a lot of what he was trying to do rhymed with what we were trying to do and and I think in that uh it really led to this moment.

Well, I I'm assuming part of the mission has been this fast growth growth and nimleness that that Altruist has, Jason. I mean, you're in California. uh you know you're away from the hub of of of financial services here in New York. Why not stay independent? Why partner with a behemoth when one of the sort of bright points of Altruist had been you know this independent sort of flavor that you had as a firm?

Yeah, I I think so. We're probably more alike than people realize. Um I heard Selen say that uh you know Vanguard is not a Wall Street titan. They're a a titan of P, you know, rural Pennsylvania. Um, we were founded on Abkini Boulevard in Venice, uh, Beach, California. So, also about the anti-wall street as you can get. Uh, but Altruist is, uh, a business that's designed to help independent financial adviserss. Uh, those, uh, independent adviserss are often referred to as RAAS.

They serve tens of millions of clients, uh, over 10 trillion in assets. Um, and we're incredibly focused on empowering those advisers to make advice better, more affordable, accessible to everybody. you'll you'll hear a lot of like again these the rhymes with like the the genesis of Altruist in many respects was inspired by Vanguard. I've been a fan of Jack Bogle's work going back into the late 90s early 2000s. Um our mission is very similar to the Vanguard mission to take a stand for all investors, right? you start to see these things um and when you are an entrepreneur and you're thinking about leaving a really long-term legacy and in our case it's one of again this very missionorientation around making advice better and more affordable and more accessible um there's uh no better partner I can think of and again this would have been likely the case when I started the company 8 years ago than Vanguard

and you also very much so rhyme with a Fidelity or a Schwab though considering your business threats them I mean SM is this Vanguard becoming even more of a direct competitor comptor with those

look if you think about the problem we're trying to solve uh and it's not just Vanguard and Altruist I think it's many firms but I'll be particular about what we're trying to solve it's how do you get more access to financial advice today only one in five Americans have access to a feebased financial advisor um we would like to see that number be most Americans having access to financial advice and even as we surveyed Vanguard's own investors um just earlier this summer what they told us 74% of them is they want access to some form of human financial guidance um to be able to make sense of all the complexity out there.

Yeah.

And and so part of what we're trying to do is use technology to give independent adviserss greater scale uh uh greater ways to reach more and more clients, but also use technology to help clients um who may just want a second opinion or may just want some basic kind of guidance to be able to get that guidance. Because if you go back to our founding mission about helping uh uh improve the chances of uh people's investment success,

um having lowcost high-erforming products is one component of it, but another component is financial discipline. And what we've seen over decades is that if you got a good feebased financial adviser that's focused on your interests that they can really instill that long-term discipline um for an investor and with technology, we think we can do that with greater scale. So again, the mission is nice, but it's the business case I'm also interested in.

I mean, is this you wrestling market share away from some of those competitors by this per

We don't because of Vanguard's unique structure, we're owned by our clients, we don't necessarily think like traditional companies will. Uh and so the the uh is one of the best accomplishments I think of Vanguard over the past 50 years. You know, it's 50 years ago this month that we launched the the first index fund. And one of the best accomplishments in my opinion is that many more people, twothirds of Americans today are investors in part because we help make investing simple and more affordable and more accessible.

And what we want to do is do the same thing for advice because there is a scarcity of advisors and of feebased advisors and there's exceptional demand whether you take my 74% you take other industry stats and and we think being able to marry kind of the the the scarcity of supply of great financial advisors with the technology

um that Jason and his team have built really helps us do um for uh investors who are seeking advice. what we've done for investors over the past 50 years who who just want a uh a lowcost uh investment product in which to enter the markets.

Well, well, having like this sort of technology based IRA custod mentioned in February it it led to kind of this panic uh among some of the uh more traditional ones. Uh Jason, what have you seen since then? like h have you been this really disruptive force or is it more you know to the point that Sam Alman made the other week sometimes these things are slower moving in adoption and really embracing AI in some of these forms?

Well on on AI I think that there's um there's still a lot more opportunity. I think there's a lot more possibility than reality you know today. So I think Sam's probably right in that regard. Uh as for us I mean we've had um a fantastic year. Uh we're still a young enough company that virtually every quarter is a new record quarter. I think the innovation is a big part of that. Uh and in our case because we serve adviserss.

Uh advisers for the last you know couple of decades have had very few choices. It's uh hard for them to run businesses. They have to make a lot of compromises. Um the compromises might be either I can only serve really wealthy people because I don't have enough capacity uh to serve more or I have to reduce the quality of work I can do because I uh want to serve many. uh a lot of our

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