Vanguard Offering Financial Advice for Just $100 (Video Excerpt)
Its highly rated digital advice platform offers a wide variety of services for a low minimum investment.
00:00 Introduction
00:13 Vanguard’s Digital Financial Advice Platform
Christine Benz: Hi. I’m Christine Benz with Morningstar. My colleague Dan Lefkovitz and I interviewed Vanguard CEO Salim Ramji at the Morningstar Investment Conference in late June for an episode of our podcast, The Long View. Here’s an excerpt from that conversation.
Dan Lefkovitz: Financial advice has been described as Vanguard’s engine number two. I’m curious how you balance serving investors, empowering them in their own practice versus providing financial advice yourself.
Salim Ramji: Yeah, and it was something, you know, if we got the history right, we started out about 10 years ago. And some of the original logic, which still applies, is that for some clients, the key to investment success is advice. And I’ve come across a number of clients both that I’ve met with our advisors or even when I’m listening in on calls who may have started out as self-directed investors that maybe in retirement they want more help and more advice than they needed in accumulation. Maybe they’re thinking about how to enable the next generation, their kids or grandkids, to interact with investments, and so they’re looking for advice not necessarily for themselves but for others in their family. And so part of why we started that offering 10 years ago was to really enable clients who wanted that service from Vanguard to be able to have access to it rather than having to go somewhere else.
And what we’re really innovating on beyond kind of that service, and this goes back to AI, we’ve got a digital advice platform. Since I’m here at Morningstar, it was highly rated by Morningstar. And back in September, we dropped the minimum account size to $100. So for $100 you can now get a diversified portfolio of underlying ETFs. You can get a digital advice capability. And the thinking behind that was that everybody should have access to good advice. And it shouldn’t just be the preserve of the very affluent or the folks that very high-net-worth advisors want to serve. And if you think as you look out over the next 10 years there’s going to be fewer advisors and more demand for their services. And so if we’re to help more and more people achieve investment success who need advice we’re going to have to do that digitally. And I think we want to take this digital advice capability that’s already well regarded by clients, by Morningstar, and others and then embed a lot of AI capabilities into it to make it even more personalized, even more capable than it is today. And I think that’s beyond dropping the minimum to $100. I think that’s the most exciting next development for digital advice is how do you make it much more enabled by AI and enable clients, whether they have $100, $1,000, $10,000 to be able to interact with it much better.
Listen to the full conversation: The Long View: Salim Ramji: The Industry Uses Complexity As a Mask to Charge More https://youtu.be/eaJxlSLhtT4?si=B1PgipEBoFNA-e01
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2025 Morningstar Investment Conference: How to Invest Today https://www.morningstar.com/markets/2025-morningstar-investment-conference-how-invest-today
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Read more from Morningstar.
Christine Benz https://www.morningstar.com/people/christine-benz
Dan Lefkovitz https://www.morningstar.com/people/dan-lefkovitz
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