Head of Digital Assets, Personal Wealth

Vanguard is a leading investment management company, and they are seeking a Head of Digital Assets for Personal Wealth. The role involves leading the digital assets strategy, developing client-facing capabilities, and ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks while driving innovation in the digital asset ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Defines and leads Personal Wealth’s digital assets vision and strategy. Establishes Vanguard’s point of view and strategic roadmap for digital assets across Personal Wealth, including where and how Vanguard should participate, what capabilities to build, partner for, or defer, and how to align innovation to Vanguard’s mission and client-first principles
• Develops the multi-year digital assets roadmap and drives execution. Translates strategy into a practical, sequenced roadmap with clear use cases, priorities, milestones, dependencies, and success measures. Leads cross-functional delivery from concept through implementation, ensuring proposals are commercially sound, operationally viable, and risk-ready
• Leads evaluation and development of client-facing digital asset capabilities and offers. Partners with business and product leaders to assess digital asset opportunities relevant to self-directed, advice, and wealth clients, including access models, experience design, servicing implications, education, pricing, and value proposition. Ensures the client offer is clear, differentiated, and aligned to Vanguard’s brand and standards
• Shapes the end-to-end operating model for digital assets. Partners across operations, technology, finance, and control groups to define the required operating model, infrastructure, controls, and governance needed to support digital asset capabilities at scale. This includes front-to-back design considerations such as onboarding, servicing, custody models, settlement, reconciliations, reporting, exception management, resiliency, and third-party integration
• Builds durable risk, legal, compliance, and governance frameworks. Works in close partnership with Risk, Legal, Compliance, and other control functions to ensure Vanguard’s approach reflects applicable regulatory requirements, risk appetite, investor protection principles, and sound governance. Embeds control, auditability, and regulatory readiness into strategy and design from the outset
• Serves as Vanguard’s internal and external digital assets authority for Personal Wealth. Advises senior leaders on market developments, regulatory changes, competitor strategies and moves, infrastructure evolution, and implications for Vanguard. Represents Vanguard in industry forums, client meetings, working groups, regulatory discussions, and external thought leadership opportunities as appropriate
• Influences enterprise alignment across Vanguard. Partners across Personal Wealth and the broader enterprise to ensure digital asset decisions are coordinated, scalable, and consistent where appropriate. Helps connect strategy across brokerage, advice, cash, investment products, technology platforms, and enterprise governance forums
• Builds and leads a high-performing team and ecosystem. Attracts, develops, and leads talent with expertise across digital assets, product, strategy, and operations. Builds strong internal partnerships and manages key external relationships with infrastructure providers, custodians, technology partners, and other ecosystem participants as needed
• Develops strategic recommendations and presents to senior leadership. Prepares clear analysis, recommendations, and decision materials for senior executives and governance forums. Brings structured thinking, sound judgment, and strong executive presence to highly visible and often ambiguous issues
• Monitors the external environment and shapes Vanguard’s response. Maintains strong awareness of digital asset market structure, tokenization trends, stablecoin developments, blockchain-enabled infrastructure, vendor capabilities, and emerging regulatory frameworks. Uses those insights to inform Vanguard’s priorities, posture, and timing
• Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned