Vanguard has seen assets in its U.S. exchange traded funds top the $200 billion mark after grabbing nearly a third of inflows the past two years, according to a report.
The company founded by John Bogle and best known for its index funds is the third-largest ETF provider behind BlackRock’s iShares and State Street Global Advisors with $670 billion and $298 billion, respectively, the Financial Times reports.
Vanguard was relatively late to the ETF business in 2001 and chief executive Bill McNabb said the company’s entry was based on a shift in the U.S. advisor market to a fee-based from commission-based model.
“That was when we began to realize that ETFs could be phenomenally helpful fundamental holdings for advisers as they started to build low-cost, highly diversified portfolios for their clients,” McNabb said in the FT article.
ETFs represented 45.2% of Vanguard’s net inflows in 2011, according to the report.