Aaron Taylor: With modernization programs or transformations like these, as many of you know, they’re multiple years, they’re complex. You have hard days and you have harder days.

And from the get-go, the Vanguard and Deloitte team together, we knew we didn’t have all the answers. We knew there was going to be a lot to figure out.

Amy Dobra: The media narrative was too frequently referring to our outdated experience, and it was becoming clear that we would not be able to fulfill our promise to our clients without getting unshackled from the inflexible legacy infrastructure.

Sri Gopalakrishnan (Deloitte): So, when Vanguard reached out to us in spring of 2021, they were considering embarking on this program, which for a brokerage of this size had never been done before.

Mike Del Rossi: Most people thought this wasn’t achievable. Modernizing or getting off the mainframe was too big a challenge. It would never be done. We’re tackling 30 to 40 years of legacy technology here, and being able to come together between our Vanguard crew members and our Deloitte teams to break down that problem into smaller pieces and make steady progress against it. Over the past several years, it has been an incredible achievement.

Aaron Taylor: Part of this modernization has also been a rethink, a redesign, a complete transformation of the digital experience at the top of the technology stack. This is where our clients are interacting with us well over two to three million times a day across our mobile app and our web experiences.

Amy Dobra: Another really interesting impact of modernization is when you pair modernization and this flexible API infrastructure that we’ve rolled out, and then put AI on top of that. Now we’re helping our application engineers not only get to market faster, but also use AI to take manual steps out of the equation—steps that used to take hours of upfront in the process and now take minutes. That’s an amazing and powerful combination.

Aaron Taylor: What was refreshing was the teamwork. On a regular basis, we’d have early morning, start-of-the-day deep dives. There were a lot of visions and hypotheses, but also a lot of rolling up our sleeves and figuring it out as we go.

Sri Gopalakrishnan:  One of the financial metrics we’re really proud of is that during the modernization, because we made smart choices on technology and where we deliver capability, the infrastructure TCO  (Total Cost of Ownership) for this business has gone down by almost 30% from 2022 to 2025—and it continues on a downward trajectory. Something we are really proud of.

Aaron Taylor: That’s really important, because it gets down into the foundation of this modernization.

I like to say we’ve liberated our data. Our data used to be stored in a highly complex mainframe database system.

Mike Del Rossi: One of the moments of pride on the program was when we were recognized with an industry award for our brokerage technology platform. This was followed by presenting at AWS re:Invent  (Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2024), where we garnered significant interest in understanding what we’ve accomplished.

Aaron Taylor: Now we’re proud to say that as we’re still finishing up the transformation, we’re routinely seeing satisfaction scores well over 4.4 and higher across both our web and mobile experiences. So we’re not done. We think best-in-class, or world-class, is over 4.5 across your mobile app, web experience, and contact center experience.

Mike Del Rossi: Traditionally, you’d say the faster you go, the poorer the quality. In this program, what we’ve found is that we’ve increased speed while raising quality—something that wasn’t previously thought possible—and we’re proving it day in and day out.