Technology
July 24, 2025
Each year, Vanguard’s technology division hosts a flagship event called unlimITed that brings together leading technologists, business leaders, and Vanguard crew members to explore the intersection of innovation, purpose, and client-centricity.
This year’s theme, “Tune into our client, and turn up the volume,” inspired Vanguard’s technology crew to elevate the voice of the client in every decision. Vanguard serves a wide range of clients—including individual investors, financial advisors, and retirement plan sponsors—and the message was clear: The best solutions start with the client’s voice.
unlimITed isn’t just a conference—it’s a cultural moment at Vanguard that enables people across technology, client, and operational teams to reflect, learn, and focus on the ways technology can enhance the client experience. This year, nearly 10,000 crew members heard from Vanguard leaders such as CEO Salim Ramji and CIO Nitin Tandon, as well as from thought leaders at companies like Disney, Google, and Ritz-Carlton.
“unlimITed is a testament to our belief that when we invest in our crew, our clients benefit,” said Tandon.
Tandon emphasizes the importance of understanding our clients in order to fulfill our mission of giving them the best chance of investment success.
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Nitin Tandon: The theme for our conference, if you couldn't tell from that short video this year is tuning into our clients voice. Not hearing, not surveying, but tuning in, which requires intention, empathy and often times humility.
Now we know that at Vanguard, our vision is our mission is to take a stand for all investors, treat them fairly, and give them the best chance of investment success. But here's the thing, you can't take a stand for someone unless you understand them deeply. You can't give them a fair shake unless you understand what fairness means to them from the other side of the screen. And you certainly can't help them be successful unless you design solutions with them.
Team tuning in allows us to earn the most important currency in our business, and that's our clients trust. And tuning in is not just about listening to client calls or scanning NPS scores. It's asking the questions.
What aren't our clients saying that we need to hear?
Where are they hesitating, and why?
Are we designing for simplicity, or are we assuming that they'll figure it out?
Tuning in is recognizing that every system we build, every alert that we trigger, every workflow that we automate is a moment to either make or break trust.
Ramji hosts a panel discussion with client-facing crew, who share that curiosity is key in building relationships based on trust.
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Toyin Kollie: I've been an advisor for four years now in Personal Advisor Select for about 18 months. When I first started as an advisor in mass affluence based, I asked my manager back then who had happened to be an advisor prior and I said what sets apart the best advisors and she said curiosity. So by being curious is how you display client care. We advisors now encouraged to utilize Webex and video calls in our conversations and you can't count the number of times clients have brought their pets to say hello to me or I see artwork behind them. And now that's changed the conversation to like, oh, you like art? So good curiosity, one, seeing them personalizing that, but also remembering to document that in my notes. So next time I can ask about their dog Bailey and what's going on with Bailey now. So they really appreciate that.
See how our U.K. tech team learned that our clients want simplicity, ease, and reliability when they built our mobile app.
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Ricci Didonato: It was going to be so important to find the common ground. We only had a league team. We're making one app and it's got to meet the needs of these divergent segments. So we went about that by talking to them. It's kind of obvious, right? We reached out through surveys and user interviews, but what was really, really nice was we actually got them inside our office in Warbrook in London. We went through co-creation with them so that they were there at our side from the very beginning shaping our mobile app.
Vimal Persaud: Alright, so as we brought our clients into the office and we talked to all of our different segments, we were able to kind of figure out four consistent themes across all segments. And the first theme was simplicity. Clients weren't asking for really complex features. They just wanted a simple mobile app.
Ricci Didonato: Yeah, and you know, it's no surprise. They wanted it to be clean and uncluttered. They wanted us to focus on the essentials.
Daniel Cardamone: So from a technology perspective, that meant we had to keep our app really lightweight in order to promote those smooth navigations, faster light times and also have consistency across the device platforms.
Vimal Persaud: And our second theme from our clients was they want they have to be easy to use on their mobile devices.
Ricci Didonato: And from a design perspective, we need to be aware of Apple's human interface guidelines, but also of the fact that all of these interactions and expectations are shaped by the apps that they have today by the competition. So it needed to feel familiar and the navigation needed to be intuitive and easy.
Daniel Cardamone: So we'd have to ensure that our touch targets are ultra responsive and would need to promote one tap actions where possible.
Vimal Persaud: Our third theme was reliability. Markets can go up and down and folks wanted to make sure the app was available no matter the conditions.
Ricci Didonato: I think we all have this expectation of our mobile experiences to be smooth and dependable. You know, we needed to think about things like progressive loading and graceful failing.
Daniel Cardamone: And so we had to prevent the things that leave long lasting states like crashes, time outs, and really any unpredictable behavior. It also had to scale under extreme environments and it had to be available all the time.
Vimal Persaud: And finally, as you can imagine, when you're taking after someone's life savings, clients really wanted to ensure that their assets were safe with us and that feeling of security was super important.
Learn how we are building experiences for clients that show we know them, care about them, and aim to delight them using hyperpersonalization.
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Melody Liu: What exactly is Hyper P? Well, it definitely goes beyond just using somebody's name in an e-mail. It involves understanding the client, really trying to figure out what their unique needs are, and building experiences that shows them we know them, we care about them, and hopefully we can build an experience that actually delights them. However, the challenge is to do this at scale. After all, it'd be easy enough to build one highly personalized experience for one client against one offer and maybe within one channel. But how do you do this and scale this for millions of clients and build millions of experiences?
That is the benefit of Hyper P It is an ecosystem of data, technology, people and process all working together to build those millions of experiences for the right clients, in the right moment, at the right place or channel, with the right message.
Notes: All investing is subject to risk.