BlackRock Onboards 8 Aladdin Clients Remotely

BlackRock says it has onboarded eight clients remotely to its Aladdin platform over the past two months, a logistical shift from how it carried out such activities before the lockdowns precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Three months ago, we could not have imagined this would be possible,” Lance Braunstein, head of the Aladdin product group at BlackRock, tells WatersTechnology. 

He says the challenge for remote implementations wasn’t so much technological and operational, as it was maintaining communication with clients. 

Pre-pandemic, BlackRock might have had anything from four to 30 staff at client sites, working side by side with them to execute an implementation project. Now, Braunstein says, the firm is using conferencing software WebEx for virtual meetings and has increased its use of other collaboration tools.

“What we found was that implementing Aladdin remotely was not much different than it would be in the office, thanks to the flexibility of our infrastructure teams and our clients that continue to support a virtual working model,” he says. “This experience has opened new doors to our delivery model as we continue to innovate how we best deliver Aladdin to our clients.”

BlackRock is pursuing a strategy of opening up Aladdin and providing clients with the ability to more easily interact with its data. By doing so, Braunstein says, the firm wants to provide a platform on top of which clients can innovate.

“As part of this effort, we have introduced Aladdin Studio, which provides a suite of tools for engineers and citizen developers to connect directly into Aladdin,” he says. “These capabilities are in use by more than 3,000 citizen developers at BlackRock today, and adoption across the Aladdin community is accelerating with more than one-third of the community building on this toolset.” 

As part of the asset manager’s platform strategy, he says Aladdin is looking to create efficiencies and reduce friction through direct integration with ecosystem participants. This includes direct point-to-point FIX connectivity with brokers and dealers, as well as integrations with providers for fund accounting, custody, and middle-office activities.

“Additionally, we have the ability to integrate third-party applications into Aladdin or integrate Aladdin applications into third-party platforms, meaning we can provide users with full integration regardless of the platform and applications that they choose to use,” Braunstein says. “Looking forward, the Aladdin community will realize greater interoperability across the entire value chain connecting clients and service providers across the industry.”

Over the next 12 months, he says, BlackRock will continue working on a platform strategy for Aladdin. This includes what Braunstein describes as the “consumerization” of technology, which the firm believes is the next step in enterprise technology.

He says this will see a simplification in the way people interact with tools, changing the concept of enterprise applications from individual tools that do specific functions to block applications tailored for specific user segments, such as portfolio managers, traders, and wealth managers.  

To successfully extend Aladdin as a platform, he says BlackRock needs to create an enhanced developer experience, which begins with allowing developers to find and easily assemble the building blocks they need.

“That is the goal behind Aladdin Studio, and we expect a number of exciting developments in this space,” he says.

To the Cloud

BlackRock recently announced a partnership with Microsoft to move Aladdin to its Azure cloud ecosystem, a move that could bring more innovations to the platform and open it up further. Both companies committed to work toward standardized data and leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data projects.

“Moving Aladdin to the cloud will allow for increased innovation across the Aladdin platform including greater flexibility and computing power. We expect the migration to take place over the next two to three years,” Braunstein says.

The company has slowly opened up the Aladdin platform to more third-party providers, beginning with its partnership with BNY Mellon announced in April last year. BNY Mellon delivered proprietary data, accounting and asset management tools through Aladdin.

Rob Goldstein, COO and head of BlackRock Solutions, said during the company’s most recent earnings call that BlackRock’s goal is to make Aladdin the common platform across the industry in order to deliver that standardized data.

“What’s amazing is that even in this year 2020, with all of the technology innovation … in the broader world and in our in our industry, the truth is asset management and the broader industry … do not have a common language that is used across market participants,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to accomplish and that’s been our aspiration with regards to Aladdin. We actually have a strategy that we call Tech 2025, which has a few basic pillars to it, which is about this concept of building and enabling this whole portfolio ecosystem, and having Aladdin be the language of portfolios in terms of that ecosystem.”