Modernized Trading: Managing Market Data with Confluent Cloud at Vanguard

Vanguard is one of the world’s most respected investment management companies, offering a broad selection of investments, advice, retirement services, and insights to individual investors, institutions, and financial professionals.  

  Vanguard’s CTO (Chief Technology Office) set out in 2021 to solve one key problem: How do we bridge the gap between systems of record with systems of engagement to create a cohesive environment built for scalability, resiliency, and flexibility? Confluent Cloud was selected as the key technology to help solve this problem, and by the middle of 2022 an official team was formed to stand up a full-service platform for the enterprise. Today, the platform has more than tripled adoption and continues to scale to new and exciting use cases demonstrating the merging of operational and analytical data components.  

   In this session, we’ll break down Vanguard’s journey from a proof-of-concept win, hosting mission critical applications, implementing a data protection encryption service, the criticality of monitoring and observability, and the role Confluent Kafka will play to improve our digital client experience. A core use case of the discussion will include a deeper dive into the modernization of order management supporting Vanguard’s trading platform.  

  The audience will understand the challenges experienced by a large financial institution in enabling Confluent Cloud as a mission critical platform to support use cases of both operational and analytical nature. They will leave with ideas on how to integrate existing services with Confluent to improve the client experience and ideas on how to modernize their infrastructure through event-driven architecture.