Long dominated by charismatic founders, Vanguard and SEI went outside for new bosses

When two financial giants based in the Philadelphia suburbs wanted to hire top investment executives this year, both Vanguard Group and SEI searched outside their own ranks and added ambitious leaders from New York-based BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager.

In May, Malvern-based Vanguard, which manages $9 trillion, named Salim Ramji as chief executive. Ramji headed BlackRock’s iShares and Index Investing Group, which has been relentlessly boosting sales of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), in competition with Vanguard. Ramji is Vanguard’s first top leader who didn’t come up through its ranks and never worked for the company’s founder, the late John C. Bogle.

In October, Oaks-based SEI, which manages or administers $1.6 trillion, named Michael Lane as SEI’s executive vice president and head of asset management. The former head of the team that sold BlackRock ETFs to investment advisers for their own clients, Lane reports to CEO Ryan Hicke, an SEI lifer who took over from SEI founder Alfred West in 2022.

After decades of growing on business and cultural lines laid out by their founders, both firms were looking for outsiders. Both sought to graft BlackRock’s rapid growth and diversification focus, which the company credits to detailed risk calculation, strategic acquisitions, and aggressive product development and marketing. BlackRock has grown as investment values are soaring, even as banks, brokerages, fund groups, and other old-line providers consolidate, and more investors are exploring nontraditional assets such as private equity and crypto.

“I had lunch with Ramji two nights ago,” at Davio’s in King of Prussia, Lane said in a recent interview at SEI’s hilly, 97-acre campus in a bend of the Schuylkill west of Valley Forge. “He’s a brilliant man. Super strategic. We talked about our experience at BlackRock, the way everyone continues looking forward, with very little celebrating of past wins. At BlackRock, you always think bigger. That’s the ethos.”

SEI’s clients are mostly corporate employers or financial firms; Vanguard says it has 50 million individual customers. Lane says the difference in approach leaves the companies room to cooperate, the way financial companies often do in building and distributing products. Vanguard and BlackRock are mostly money managers; a larger part of SEI’s sales are financial technology, for example, to help brokerages keep track of customers’ funds.

“SEI provides us with the technology platform, the fund board, the transfer agency, and daily pricing. Recently they are also providing services to our licensed agents,” said Tony Minopoli, chief investment officer and president at Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, a $1.8 billion unit of the $140 billion-asset Knights of Columbus, a life insurance company and Catholic fraternal group based in Connecticut.

“They have made themselves part of our team, in a thoughtful, consultative way, and really made it quite possible for us to expand,” Minopoli added, noting he’s been able to negotiated lower SEI fees as it provides more services. “We’re looking at offering a new suite of Catholic-aligned exchange-traded funds (ETFs)”, using SEI technology and the Knights’ own stock selections.

CEO Hicke said Lane is the latest in a string of hires adding Wall Street experience to SEI’s homegrown team — which he said is what West wanted when he relinquished control. “He didn’t ask me to run this the same way he did. He asked me to change it,” the CEO said. “That’s very liberating.”

Lane says Hicke has charged him with helping “break up the very siloed mentality” long prevalent in the investment business, in which different teams, each with their own support staff, built and sold products to banks, insurers, government agencies, and other distinct markets. “When you are big, everything needs to be scale-able,” growing efficiently without extra expense and duplication, Lane said.

SEI was an early champion of the unwalled “open office” that has become more familiar across white-collar workplaces as more professionals work remotely. At many companies, Hicke noted, top executives put workers into an open space with no fixed work stations, but retain their own walled offices, leaving young staff feeling isolated and “dehumanized. It’s very dangerous.” SEI executives like Lane are expected to walk around, meet casually as well as deliberately with staff, bring people with problems to talk to the bosses who can help them.

That also includes freeing staff from meetings where they don’t really need to be. Instead, “you’ll see people walking and talking on the trails around campus. Liberated, in a good way.”

The home office is for talking strategy and reviewing SEI’s relentless measurements of client results — which includes deciding what opportunities not to pursue. The company employs 2,500, most of them based in Oaks.

The bosses are visible, but “you won’t see us here every day. We are out in front of clients and prospects. You don’t sell sitting inside our walls. Get out there.”