The Head of Client Services is a senior leadership role with end-to-end accountability for the continuous evolution of Vanguard’s distribution of pooled funds and model portfolio solutions to professional investors across the UK and Europe, while ensuring the highest standards of service quality.
The role is central to supporting Vanguard’s clients and distribution strategy, ensuring resilient, scalable and regulatory aligned services that underpin Vanguard’s growth ambitions, protect investors, and enable strong, trusted relationships with distribution partners and clients.
The role balances day-to-day operational excellence with strategic leadership, regulatory stewardship and senior stakeholder engagement.
This role reports into the Head of Operations for Financial Advisory Services.
Key Responsibilities
1. Market, Product & Distribution Expertise
- Demonstrate strong knowledge of European markets, including pooled fund vehicles and intermediated retail and wholesale clients (e.g. platforms, wealth managers, private banks and financial advisers), providing guidance and advice to Sales and Client Services.
- Maintain a strong understanding of the cross-border distribution ecosystem for mutual funds and ETFs, including local country servicing nuances; advise on market practice, risk and operational requirements.
- Manage key client relationships and navigate complex, multi-layered distribution chains
2. Governance, Risk & Regulatory Stewardship
- Own and embed cross-border distribution governance practices for the UK and Irish fund range, ensuring robust, proportionate and regulator-ready control frameworks.
- Lead the evaluation of non-standard business requests, ensuring appropriate stakeholder consultation, clear documentation and adherence to governance frameworks.
- Lead post-incident reviews and remediation activity, ensuring root-cause analysis, clear accountability and sustainable outcomes.
3. Strategy, Service Model & Continuous Improvement
- Set and execute the strategic direction for servicing capabilities, balancing scale, automation, risk reduction and client experience.
- Challenge and improve processes and service models to reduce manual intervention, improve data quality and strengthen end-to-end controls.
- Partner closely with key stakeholders such as Technology, Legal, Compliance, Risk and Product Development to design and maintain an optimal service delivery model.
- Oversee strategic relationships with internal and external vendors and service partners, holding them accountable for service delivery, remediation and risk management.
4. Leadership, People & Culture
- Provide senior leadership to the Client Services team supporting multiple European markets, ensuring consistent, high-quality servicing.
- Lead, hire and develop a high-performing team; set clear objectives and performance expectations; and make talent and compensation decisions in line with HR policies and procedures.
- Develop leadership capability and succession planning, with a strong focus on coaching, inclusive leadership and continuous learning.
- Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration and shared ownership aligned to Vanguard’s values.
5. Senior Stakeholder & External Engagement
- Represent Client Services in senior forums, committees and board-level discussions, providing clear, credible and balanced insight.
- Periodic travel to European Sales offices.
Leadership Scope
- Influence across multiple European markets and business lines.
- Accountability for critical client servicing processes supporting both UK and Irish funds.
- Regular engagement with Heads of Sales and senior sales executives across the UK and Europe.
- Leadership of teams and managers, with indirect influence across Technology and third-party providers.
Experience & Capabilities
- Minimum of 15 years working within the asset management arena. Preference will be given to those with a proven track record in a Distribution function.
- Experience leading large-scale servicing transformation, including process simplification and automation.
- Knowledge of UK and EU regulatory expectations relevant to distribution servicing and operational resilience.
- Experience managing material third-party arrangements and associated risk and performance governance.
- Extensive senior-level experience in asset management, financial services, or regulated operational environments.
- Demonstrated leadership of complex, multi-country operations with strong regulatory and risk accountability.
- Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, incidents, and organisational change.
- Strong executive communication skills, including board-level written and verbal engagement.
Qualifications
- Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience. Graduate degree preferred.
- IMC or equivalent qualification
- European language is beneficial but not essential
Special Factors
- Vanguard is not offering sponsorship for this position.
- This is a hybrid position and would require you to work in the office Tuesday-Thursday.
- European Designation: MIFID II
How We Work
Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.
