Vanguard Investor Choice: Update on our continued progress

More than 50 million individual investors have chosen to entrust Vanguard with their hard-earned savings. The money that Vanguard manages belongs to those investors, and we take our responsibility to them seriously.

In 2023, Vanguard launched its Investor Choice pilot program to provide individual investors with the ability to express their perspectives on shareholder matters at the companies held in their equity index funds. Vanguard Investor Choice enables index fund investors to choose from a range of proxy voting policy options that direct how a fund will vote proxies for certain portfolio companies, proportionate to the investor’s ownership in that fund. Since its launch, investors have begun to use this choice and select policy options that align with their personal views and preferences.

Given the success of the initial pilots and investors’ interest in engaging in the proxy voting process, we continue to build upon our efforts to allow fund investors to select a proxy voting policy that aligns with their preferences. In advance of the 2025 proxy season, we plan to expand Vanguard Investor Choice further to include additional index funds, thus enabling more investors to participate in it, while continuing to evolve the execution of the pilot program to best serve our investors. We are also exploring adding to the range of policy providers and options offered to reflect the range of investor preferences.

As the fund company that popularized index investing almost 50 years ago, Vanguard has a history of democratizing investing for individual investors. Vanguard Investor Choice is a continuation of that mission. For more information and data from the pilot, please visit our Vanguard Investor Choice page.