I would love to hear from a Vanguard employee on their tech challenges, e.g., why is the client web interface significantly worse than competitors? Or is it purposeful? E.g., slow down, trade less?!
I actually like their revamp a lot (last few years?). They have a million subdomains they send you around which is weird, but I don't mind the current UI. Sometimes they still send you to an old page though, like for scheduled investments (if I recall). What are the parts that irk you, out of curiousity?
I think Fidelity's Net Benefits (which I believe is distinct from the personal site) is pretty bad though.
I HATE the new web interface. It's significantly slower, shows less useful information, and has many more times where it just doesn't work as compared to the old web interface. If there was an option to go back to using the old web interface fully, I would sign up for that immediately.
For an example of a thing I hate about the new web interface is trying to buy a stock. You end up in some different part of the website where after you place your order it shows you a differently formatted order status page than the normal order status page. There's an Exit button at the top. Pressing the Exit button will pop up asking if you want to leave because you'll lose all your unplaced orders, of which you have none because how you got to the Order Status page was by fully placing an order. It's confusing for no reason.
Vanguard is really good at listening to feedback and using that to inform fixes to the various web and mobile applications. So if you're using the UI and see a survey, you should absolutely submit this feedback. They listen to it, and effect that change quite quickly on modernized pages.
Agree with all you've noted. I'd also add that 'Exit'/'Close' buttons sometimes don't work (I use Firefox btw). Worse, you have to click so many different buttons to buy just one index fund.
In contrast, I can do all that in one pop-up/side panel in Fidelity or Charles Schwab. I have been a long time user of Vanguard (almost two decades) and I wish they revert to their old web UI, which is informative and simple enough to get all the jobs I need to do in an efficient manner.
Oh interesting. I guess I only follow the fund purchase flow on the website once and a while and everything else is automated, so I don't end up using the site as much. Probably makes me a not-so-great testimonial in hindsight.
Most of my Vanguard investments are in a very small number of IRA mutual funds which have automatic monthly deposits configured, but even just for the few trades I do with fun money each month the current web UI grates on me. I know it can be better, Vanguard used to be good at this.
Not the OP, but besides the subdomains, it feels like each section/UI/subdomain was designed by a different team. The overall interface doesn't feel cohesive (to me).
In my experience, every brokerage UI is dripping with tech debt. You can see all of the layers of paint put on over the years on top of some old ass legacy system underneath it all. You click around enough and find 2000s UI elements still in most of them.
There has been an immense push to modernize the Vanguard site and the underlying architecture. This has been an enormous effort over multiple years. Since Vanguard was always a "no-branches" company, it's always been web-based. So, as a result, much of the site was built at the "bleeding edge of the time" but they are now in a position where that needs to be fully modernized.
Vanguard's architecture is enormous, but they are getting closer and closer to fully modernizing the site and retiring legacy completely. Its something that has been happening and will continue to happen over the next few years.
Not an employee, but the reason I ended up not using them is because when I went to sign up, due to having a 401K account with them via a previous employer, I had to call their customer hotline, and their customer representative wanted alot of sensitive information over the phone - including giving them a password for my account.
I refuse to do business with a company with that shoddy of security practices. There's no reason what the representative was doing couldn't have been done online through a secure portal that respects my privacy, but alas, it could not.
I went with Fidelity. Its been great. Though all these brokerages have their pros and cons, I groked the setup at Fidelity pretty fast.
