BlackRock Builds Fintech Cloud SaaS Business Pursuing Wealth Managers
Posted on 11/22/2021
Despite BlackRock Inc. having trillions in assets under management, most of that managed capital is in the form of passive investment management. However, with that stream of steady income, BlackRock has been building and acquiring companies in the fintech space. Aladdin is an electronic system by BlackRock Solutions.
BlackRock has a unit called Aladdin WealthTech that has US$ 1 billion in annual revenue. The unit aims to make products that help financial advisors and their clients build financial plans and portfolios. Aladdin Wealth was born three years ago as a BlackRock hackathon project and has rapidly expanded as a product used by some of the largest wealth managers in the world. In June 2021, iCapital Network and BlackRock disclosed an expansion of their existing relationship to increase accessibility to private market investments for wealth managers. The combination of BlackRock’s private market investment products and iCapital’s technology and solutions hopes to make easier the operational and administrative complexities faced by wealth managers seeking to distribute private market investments to their clients. The partnership will focus on the distribution of global private market funds, as well as the ELTIF, an increasingly important vehicle for the distribution of private markets in Europe.
In June 2021, BlackRock and Cassini Systems, a provider of pre- and post-trade margin and collateral analytics for derivatives markets, entered into a strategic partnership to integrate Cassini analytics into BlackRock’s Aladdin platform. The integration will allow mutual clients to factor margin-based analytics into their pre- and post-trade decision-making.
In 2019, BlackRock acquired eFront, a private markets data firm. At September 2021, BlackRock revealed the have over 24 clients using both eFront and Aladdin across their entire whole portfolios.