BST Awards 2023: Best buy-side portfolio analysis tool—BlackRock

Overview

BlackRock’s Aladdin platform is a buy-side-focused multi-asset portfolio analysis offering designed to provide investors with the information and transparency they need to make the most informed investment decisions. By integrating robust, quality-controlled data, models and analytics at scale, Aladdin offers a unified, flexible, and dynamic framework to help clients understand their portfolio positions, performance, manage risk, and act with conviction on investment opportunities.

The solution  

Aladdin technology provides a detailed view of portfolio allocation, risk contribution and performance across asset classes. It combines quality-controlled security indicative risk, analytics exposure, and performance and attribution data with customizable and scalable reporting. Users can analyze risk and performance across multiple lenses via configurable, interactive dashboards fed by BlackRock risk models and analytics. They can perform a range of portfolio modeling exercises, including stress-testing, scenario and what-if analysis, and optimization.

Secret sauce 

Aladdin’s portfolio analysis solution differentiates itself by its breadth of asset class support, depth of analytics, and adaptability to evolving market conditions. Its proprietary risk models, analytics, and performance engines enable multi-asset analysis of drivers/detractors of performance through a variety of lenses. Coupled with market data, what-if analysis, and a portfolio optimizer, buy-side firms can optimize their investment decisions and seek better outcomes for their clients. BlackRock, as a user and a provider of Aladdin, continually refines the product for its clients.

Recent milestones

Milestones over the last 12 months have focused on streamlining performance and risk workflows, expanding analytics content, and improving the user experience.

• Content for portfolio analysis: Climate analytics deep dive data, portfolio commitment risk, and expanded analytics for liquidity analysis and historical value-at-risk (VaR)
• Intuitive workflows: Enhancements to stress-testing reports and scenario creation capabilities
• User experience: Increased usability of building reports, configuring widgets, and transparency of calculation options and settings

Future objectives 

• Whole portfolio: Expanding asset class coverage to indirect and direct private credit and introducing a proprietary private credit factor risk model
• Enhancing performance capabilities, such as money-weighted returns inclusive of private market transactions
• Connecting workflows: Providing integrated portfolio analysis-based workflows that enhance operational efficiency and transparency across Aladdin’s user base
• Regulation: Delivering region-specific regulatory reporting frameworks for risk-based capital (EU Solvency II, Singapore RBC2, AM Best Europe Rating Services) and sustainability (TCFD, EU Taxonomy, SFDR)

Why they won

BlackRock continues to rack up the wins in the annual Buy-Side Technology Awards―in addition to this category, it also won the award for the best buy-side investment book of record (Ibor) platform, and the best overall buy-side technology provider for 2023, all thanks to its ubiquitous Aladdin offering. Aladdin’s strengths lie in its ability to help buy-side practitioners manage their portfolio allocation, risk contribution and performance functions across all asset classes, essentially providing them with accurate and transparent snapshots of how portfolios are performing, the level of risk consumed in attaining that performance, and the specific parts of the portfolio that are performing (or underperforming) relative to the whole. Aladdin really is the all-singing, all-dancing buy-side front- and middle-office platform and there isn’t much that it doesn’t do with aplomb.