Bill McNabb is trying to make Vanguard [profile] "a much more global organization."

Vanguard's CEO shared that tidbit and more in an Q&A, posted Sunday afternoon, with Kirsten Grind of the Wall Street Journal. The interview comes after the low-cost mutual fund giant crossed the $3-trillion-AUM mark last month and after the Investment Company Institute's (ICI's) board of governors reelected McNabb last week as the trade group's chairman.

In the interview, McNabb shares what keeps him up at night, calling cybersecurity "the biggest risk to American business today" and pointing to "geopolitical uncertainty," too. He also confides that he would never think about moving the Malvern, Pennsylvania-based firm to Wall Street, "not in a million years."

McNabb also declined to contrast himself heavily with famous Vanguard founder Jack Bogle.

The things we shared were a maniacal focus on our ownership [i.e. Vanguard's mutually-owned structure] and the fact that we serve only one constituency, our investors. We express it differently: Jack Bogle would be way more public, and I'm driving it more inside the company, I think, and spending a lot of time focusing on that.

The interview also includes discussions of the rise of indexed investments, the claims of an ex-Vanguard employee who accuses the fund firm of being a tax dodger, and the threat of the "systemically important" label hanging over large asset managers. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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