Vanguard’s New CEO: The Story Everyone is Missing

Описание: #Morningstar  #SalimRamji #VanguardLeadership

Why we think worries about Vanguard’s decision to bring in an outsider as CEO are misplaced.

00:00 Introduction

00:21 Initial Impressions of Vanguard’s New CEO From BlackRock

01:58 Considering Vanguard’s Previous and Current Leadership



Susan Dziubinski: So that’s a look at the funds and the investments. Now, you and I sat down about six months ago after Vanguard announced that it had brought in a new CEO from BlackRock, Salim Ramji. Now he’s only been on the job for six months, but what are your impressions so far of what he’s been saying? Anything that he’s been doing?

Daniel Sotiroff: This is like the $10 trillion question. It’s what everybody wants to know. So on the surface, you look at all the interviews he’s been doing, all the press he’s been doing. He’s saying all the right things, and I think he gets it. He’s a smart guy. He’s been around this industry for a while. He understands what Vanguard is, what it means to the industry, what it’s done for millions of investors. I’m pretty much sold on that. I’m not concerned about that. So far everything I would say has played out generally as I would expect. The first few months are pretty boring. And usually that’s just the CEO getting into the office, trying to figure out the lay of the land and what’s going on and how do I fit in here and everything like that.



You usually got to wait about six to 12 months with any CEO transition before you actually start to see things move around, start to take shape, and you can kind of see what he’s doing. In a lot of ways, Vanguard has been right on schedule, maybe a little bit early. So December, they announced they were going to do a little bit of a reorg. Basically what that means is they’re going to carve out the wealth and advice module from their Vanguard personal investor division, and they’re going to make that its own stand-alone division. And I don’t think there’s really anything you have to read into it. Basically it’s just Vanguard saying, “Hey, we’re getting really serious about the advice and wealth business.”



We’ve known that. This is not a surprise. We’ve known they’ve been going down this path. They’re just getting a little bit more serious about it, and they’re dedicating an entire division to that effort.



The other thing I’d mentioned here is along the lines of this $10 trillion question. With an external hire, a lot of people I think were questioning this: Is this going to be a problem? Is this something that’s going to throw Vanguard off its investor-friendly ethos? I’d like to point out two things I think really … They’re food for thought, let’s put it that way. A lot of people have been focused on Salim and Salim only, and I don’t think they’ve been paying attention to what has been going on with the other leadership ranks within Vanguard. So that gives us a little bit of a clue. So what I mean by that, Buckley and McNabb, the previous two CEOs before Salim, actually had multiple roles. So yes, they were the CEO, but they were also the president of Vanguard and they were the chairman of Vanguard’s board of trustees. So they actually had three roles and multiple responsibilities associated with those roles.


Watch the full conversation: Vanguard in 2025: What Investors Need to Know    • Vanguard in 2025: What Investors Need to Know  



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Daniel Sotiroff https://www.morningstar.com/people/da...

Susan Dziubinski https://www.morningstar.com/people/su...



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