BST Awards 2021: Best integrated front-office platform—BlackRock

OVERVIEW

Aladdin provides a holistic, whole portfolio view of investment exposures, risks and performance across public and private investments.

Typical user-firms: Asset managers, banks, endowments, insurers, pension funds, government-sponsored enterprises and corporates. 

2020 Aladdin financials: $1.1 billion revenue; 17% revenue growth; 12% annual contract value growth. More than 20 clients in Emea, North America and Asia-Pacific use Aladdin to manage their portfolio risks across private and public assets. Aladdin employs over 4,600 technologists and recently added the Timberland and Farmland asset classes.

WHAT’S NEW 

The integration of Aladdin and eFront provides visibility on both fund and asset level look-through data for private equity, real estate, and infrastructure funds alongside public assets. The datasets are now incorporated into risk calculations for multi-asset portfolios and for private market-specific performance. Aladdin now supports several capital account metrics, including commitments, capital calls and distributions. 

The integration of climate analytics into Aladdin makes climate information actionable, allowing users to stress-test investments to estimate how they might perform in different climate scenarios like those outlined in the Paris Agreement. Launched in the fall of 2020, Aladdin Studio provides capabilities and tools to allow users to build on top of Aladdin and create differentiated solutions for investment management workflows.

WHAT’S TO COME 

BlackRock will enhance Aladdin with a live IBOR view across public and private markets. It will support real-time portfolio construction, cash forecasting, pre-trade compliance and centralized controls. The firm is also working on proprietary technology to improve data collection in the private markets, which will improve on public domain natural-language processing (NLP) tools and provide greater scale and accuracy in deciphering documents at scale.

WHY THEY WON

For quite some time, the Aladdin platform has been one of the most influential trading platforms in the capital markets. BlackRock has further evolved this ubiquitous offering by providing information related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments and sustainability. And in a world where data is king, few can compete with the Aladdin offering.