Vanguard & Altruist CEOs Talk Wealth Platform Deal, Prediction Markets

**Salim Ramji** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios.

**Dani Burger** (0:04)
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 Salim Ramji and Altruist CEO Jason Wenk in an exclusive interview. Thank you both so much for joining. Jason, do you enjoy the notoriety you still have for making all of your peers sell off? Look, this is a really exciting deal. And Salim, if I can start with you, because 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 Altruist, who you've already partnered with, to outright buy it?

**Salim Ramji** (0:52)
We've been an investor in Altruist going back 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 about is what we're also impressed about today. The first piece was really the mission that Jason had founded the firm around, which is making advice more accessible, more affordable and better for many more Americans.
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 the Vanguard perspective, we want to do for financial advice what we've done for the past 50 years for investments, which is really make it much more accessible to many more people.
And part of this alignment around the mission, right, when Jason was talking about the mission of Altruist to me and we were comparing notes, a lot of what he was trying to do rhymed with what we were trying to do. And I think in that, it really led to this moment.

**Dani Burger** (1:58)
Well, I'm assuming part of the mission has been this fast growth and growth and nimbleness that Altruist has, Jason. I mean, you're in California, you're away from the hub of financial services here in New York. Why not stay independent? Why partner with the behemoth when one of the sort of bright points of Altruist had been this independent sort of flavor that you had as a firm?

**Jason Wenk** (2:19)
Yeah, I think so. We're probably more alike than people realize. I heard Salim say that Vanguard is not a Wall Street Titan. They're a Titan of rural Pennsylvania. We were founded on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach, California. So also about the anti-Wall Street as you can get. But Altruist is a business that's designed to help independent financial advisors. Those independent advisors are often referred to as RIAs. They serve tens of millions of clients, over $10 trillion in assets.
And we're incredibly focused on empowering those advisors to make advice better, more affordable, accessible to everybody. You'll hear a lot of like again, the rhymes with like 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. Our mission is very similar to the Vanguard mission to take a stand for all investors. So you start to see these things.
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 mission orientation around making advice better and more affordable, more accessible, there's no better partner I can think of. And again, this would have been likely the case when I started the company eight years ago, then Vanguard.

**Dani Burger** (3:36)
And you also very much so rhyme with a fidelity or a Schwab though, considering your business threats them. I mean, Salim, is this Vanguard becoming even more of a direct competitor with those?

**Salim Ramji** (3:46)
Look, if you think about the problem we're trying to solve, 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 fee-based financial advisor.
We would like to see that number be most Americans having access to financial advice. And even as we surveyed Vanguard's own investors, just earlier this summer, what they told us, 74% of them, is they want access to some form of human financial guidance to be able to make sense of all the complexity out there. And so part of what we're trying to do is use technology to give independent advisors greater scale, greater ways to reach more and more clients, but also use technology to help clients 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 improve the chances of people's investment success, having low cost, high performing 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 fee based financial advisor that's focused on your interests, that they can really instill that long term discipline for an investor. And with technology, we think we can do that with greater scale.