Vanguard Super has celebrated three years in market with the announcement of an average 14.51 per cent a year return over three years in its Lifecycle investment option for members aged 47, with Vanguard Australia managing director Daniel Shrimski saying the fund was “on the glidepath” its parent company had set for it.  
 
“When we look at growth, when we look at investment performance, when we look at operational performance… we feel really good about where we’re at,” Shrimski told Investment Magazine. 
 
“Those are what we think of first and foremost as we look back on the three years and grade ourselves.” 
 
Shrimski said that Vanguard was happy not just with the performance but the way its offer has been “resonating with the market”. 
 
“We built [Vanguard Super] in the way we wanted to build it; we partnered with a start-up administrator that was built on modern technology, and I think there’s an advantage to that – we don’t have legacy technology, we don’t have legacy issues.  
 
“It’s not to say we don’t have issues or that we’re immune from issues because we’re certainly not… We’re just over the start line and we’ve got a long way to go. By no means do we sit back and say ‘We’ve got it all worked out’.”  
 
Vanguard Super’s administrator, Grow Inc. – which recently onboarded HESTA and is in the process of onboarding NGS Super – is reportedly up for sale, with the likes of Apex, SS&C and dominant provider MUFG lining up to kick the tires.  
 
“We’re in very regular contact with Grow and it’s business as usual,” Shrimski says. “They’re doing a fabulous job; we couldn’t be happier with them from a service level standpoint, and there’s a lot of development they’re working on for us.” 
 
That includes what Vanguard calls Adviser+, the adviser portal that it hopes will drive the next phase of its growth.  
 
“We’ve got an offer out there we thinks resonates with advisers but there’s a lot there we still need to do to develop that,” Shrimski says.  
 
“About 90 per cent-plus are still individual investors – Australian by Australian by Australian making an active decision to switch to Vanguard Super. It’s one of the things we’re most proud of; we’ve got approximately 50,000 Australians that have actively made that decision.  
 
We’re opening that up to advisers, but if we look at where the flows have come from over the last few quarters it would still be 90 per cent individual investors.”  
 
Separately, Shrimski has previously flagged the possibility of Vanguard Super including private markets in its investment mix, but says that – for now – the fund wants to “stay in the space that [it’s] confident playing in”. 
 
“I think there is absolutely a place for private investments in Vanguard Super down the track. But we’re not in the position to do that yet; we would absolutely insist on it being low cost,” he says. 
 
“If I look in the US, there’s a really interesting partnership that Vanguard, Wellington and Blackstone have formed to jointly create product, and it’s interesting for us to observe the evolution of that.”