Vanguard

Vanguard, a substantial player in the investment management landscape, embarked on a five-year modernization journey in 2020 to enhance its digital channels and improve investor outcomes. In this video, Vanguard Chief Technology Officer Mike Carr discusses the 4 key elements of this initiative and the results they have seen so far.

• Cloud Migration: Moving to the public cloud enabled Vanguard to utilize infrastructure as a service and configuration as code, empowering developers with faster access to resources and enabling them to focus on feature creation.
• Microservice Architecture: Transitioning from monolithic applications to microservices facilitated quicker changes, as smaller units of code limited the impact radius of modifications, enhancing stability and predictability.
• Agile Methodology Reinforcement: While Vanguard adopted Agile in 2006, the lack of robust continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) pipelines hampered its effectiveness. The modernization initiative focused on reclaiming true Agile principles, providing comprehensive training, and ensuring alignment with modern development practices.
• Product Orientation: Vanguard shifted from ephemeral project teams to enduring product teams. This change aimed to minimize overhead associated with team formation, preserve valuable subject matter expertise, and foster continuous performance improvement.

These efforts yielded impressive results: a five-fold increase in technology change rate and a 75% reduction in major incident frequency. This demonstrates that Vanguard successfully balanced speed and stability in its modernization journey. Furthermore, customer satisfaction (CSAT) grew as the company leveraged its enhanced agility to implement CX improvements aligned with investor goals.