Investing in advice

Tim Buckley: We've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in advice engines, improving our advice offer. So that people can have full financial planning—no give-up—full financial planning to do things like health care estimation, tax-optimized retirement income, tax-loss harvesting, optimizing around multiple goals. All of that for less than the cost of an active fund, and it's consistently administered. And you can do it pure digital, or we have more than 1,000 certified financial planners if you want to work with a certified financial planner. So that is a huge part of what we can do in the future to continue to add value.

Now, our clients own us, right; we are aligned with them. So when we do things online, we want to make them better investors. So we will nudge them towards a better outcome.

Think about our participants in our 401(k) plans. We continually nudge them to do simple things like, hey, are you taking advantage of your company match? It might be something simple like that. Sixty percent of them actually took us up on those nudges and became better investors.

We'll roll that out more and more to our clients. But the difference with Vanguard is we will be nudging people to do things to make them better investors, to improve their outcome. Not to cross-sell. Not to improve a bottom line. Because our bottom line is our client's bottom line, and it's their end result; and that defines Vanguard.