To our advisors, clients, team, and partners,
We announced today that Altruist has agreed to be acquired by Vanguard, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
There are announcements you spend years imagining, and others you never really believe will be possible. For me, this is somehow both.
The most important thing about this announcement is not the transaction itself. It is what Vanguard and Altruist can do together for advisors and the people we serve.
I first encountered Vanguard and its founder, Jack Bogle, near the beginning of my career. I read his books, watched countless interviews, and found myself drawn not only to his ideas about investing, but to the conviction behind them.
Vanguard’s mission is “to take a stand for all investors, to treat them fairly, and to give them the best chance for investment success.” I have always loved the words “take a stand” because Jack did exactly that. He was willing to say things the financial industry often didn’t want to hear, and advocated relentlessly for millions of ordinary investors.
Jack also understood that better outcomes depend on more than just making a good return on paper. Investors also need to keep costs low and avoid costly mistakes when markets become uncertain.
For more than 50 years, Vanguard has tackled the first challenge with extraordinary success, significantly lowering the cost of investing by cutting fund fees more than 2,000 times since its founding. Their low-cost investing model has fundamentally reshaped what investors expect from our industry.
Altruist was built to address the second. Great financial advisors help people make informed decisions and stay the course through recessions, bear markets, and everything life throws at them. By giving advisors better tools and removing unnecessary cost and complexity, we can make high-quality financial advice better, affordable, and accessible to more people.
At their core, Vanguard and Altruist have been working toward the same goal from different directions: giving more people a better chance at financial success.
That’s why I see such a strong fit between the two institutions. Vanguard’s investment expertise and resources will give us greater capacity to build the advisor technology and custody capabilities our customers rely on. We’ll be able to solve more problems and help more advisors grow their businesses while delivering exceptional outcomes to their clients. For Vanguard, Altruist creates another way to support investors who choose to work with a financial advisor.
Shortly after starting Altruist, I remember one of my earliest investors asked me which company in our industry I would most want as a strategic partner. I answered Vanguard without hesitation. At the time, I never imagined that partnership could someday become this.
Yet, as Altruist grew, I found myself returning to a question every founder eventually faces: What kind of institution can this become long after I’m gone?
Building an enduring institution takes more than great products. It takes a mission, culture, and organizational structure that can support it for decades to come. Since day one, a principle behind everything we do at Altruist is simple: If something isn’t good for the end client, we shouldn’t do it. So the question was not simply who could help Altruist grow, but who I would trust to protect that belief and carry it forward.
As Salim Ramji, CEO of Vanguard, and I began talking more deeply about possible futures for Altruist, the answer to my question became incredibly obvious.
Vanguard is one of the rare institutions in financial services designed around helping people achieve better outcomes. Vanguard funds are owned by their shareholders, and those funds own Vanguard. There are no outside public shareholders demanding financial results that may conflict with client outcomes. The result is an institution that has been able to compound its focus on investors for more than half a century. Joining forces would be an opportunity to accelerate Altruist’s impact and mission.
What makes this even more meaningful is that our relationship with Vanguard didn’t begin with this transaction. Vanguard became an investor in Altruist early in our journey and has been alongside us for more than six years.
We now have an opportunity to bring together an extraordinary team, technology we’ve spent years developing, and a deep commitment to financial advisors with an institution whose mission helped inspire much of this work in the first place.
I also couldn’t be more proud of the Altruist team. Building in this industry is hard. Building something with the potential to improve millions of lives is even harder. This team has shown the kindness, brilliance, and grit that inspires me every day.
For more than 50 years, Vanguard has built one of the most enduring legacies in investing, showing what is possible when an institution puts investors first. I’m incredibly excited to work alongside Salim and the Vanguard team, and I am confident Altruist will play a meaningful role in writing the next 50 years of that story.
To everyone who has helped build Altruist, trusted us, challenged us, invested in us, partnered with us, or believed in what we were trying to do: thank you.
We have a lot more work ahead. We’re ready.
Jason Wenk
Founder and CEO, Altruist