Can Anyone Bury BlackRock?

Apple has the iPhone. Netflix hasHouse of Cards。Bloomberg has the terminal. And BlackRock has Aladdin.

Aladdin, for those not inserted into the bloodstream of institutional asset management, is the industry’s dominant platform for keeping track of portfolios. It wasn’t the first — since the 1980s mundane tools like accounting software, allocation modeling systems, and market data feeds have become essential — but it has been, for more than a decade now, almost certainly the best.

2006年初2006年初，当时美国第二大养老基金发现了阿拉丁，在世纪初商业化的投资组合操作系统。加州国家教师退休系统的固定收入团队正在寻找更好的方法来跟踪那么追踪320亿美元的债券组合。

Among the providers under consideration were Wilshire Analytics and Charles River Development, which each supported front-office functions like risk management and performance attribution. Charles River, in particular, had made a name for itself with its portfolio management software, which by the end of 2006 had more than 225 clients across 30 countries.

Both were rejected in favor of BlackRock’s Asset Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network — Aladdin, for short.

“他们是最全面的，”投资组合经理Rosie Lucchesini-杰克说。“他们可以在当时的固定收入内支持所有不同的资产课程。”

Although it had been commercially available for only a few years, Aladdin was already sought after by institutional investors eager to get their hands on the risk calculator behind BlackRock. Since its founding in 1988, BlackRock had developed a reputation for strong risk management. The Federal Reserve Board of New York, for example, picked the firm during the financial crisis to manage a $30 billion portfolio of Bear Stearns assets after the bank collapsed.

Today the Aladdin platform supports more than $18 trillion, making it one of the largest portfolio operating systems in the industry. BlackRock says Aladdin technology has been adopted in some form by 210 institutional clients globally, including asset owners such as CalSTRS and even direct competitors like Vanguard.

And BlackRock has no intention of stopping here. The world’s largest asset manager has, over the past few years, placed a huge emphasis on technology — CEO Larry Fink is aiming to have 30 percent of the firm’s revenue derived from tech by 2022. It is an ambitious vision that encompasses a number of tech initiatives, among them an artificial intelligence lab and a series of fintech acquisitions. But a key factor is the continued growth of the Aladdin business.

没有战斗，布莱克克的竞争对手不会下降。

Charles River, for its part, has joined forces with State Street to create what the two firms are describing as the “first-ever global, front-to-back, client servicing platform from a single provider.” Others, like Copenhagen-based SimCorp, are countering BlackRock’s efforts with aggressive expansions of their own. The European firm is now targeting growth in the North American market, where it sees its Dimension platform and BlackRock’s Aladdin as “the only game in town,” according to James Corrigan, managing director of SimCorp North America.

“If you look at us versus some of the other large providers in the industry, based on our research we’re all roughly the same size,” he says. “On a global basis we’re relatively neck and neck [with Aladdin] in terms of the race to win this market.”

Others, however, see BlackRock in the lead. As one former competitor puts it, “It will be hard to catch them unless they lose their focus.”

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“真正了解黑石，you need to understand Aladdin,” sayschief operating officer Rob Goldstein那who oversees Aladdin as head of BlackRock Solutions. “In the earliest days of BlackRock — almost from day one — the firm was very focused on building this risk capability to understand each and every asset, each and every benchmark, and each and every portfolio.”

When Goldstein joined BlackRock as an analyst, it was 1994 — the year of whatFortune杂志被称为伟大的邦克大屠杀。固定收入投资组合在利率上升和萎缩的债券价格上涨和债券价格上涨 - 而且风险分析白天花园开发融入聚光灯。

“我们开始从客户呼吁说，”你可以通过你拥有的风险能力来看看我的整个投资组合吗？“”Goldstein回忆起来。当骗子皮博迪商人被抓住了公司的利润时，导致丑闻导致父母通用电气销售证券公司的资产的丑闻，GE聘请了Blackrock清算田女队Peabody的抵押贷款组合。“导致我们通过BlackRock未直接管理的平台运行投资组合的公平需求，”Goldstein解释道。“真正种植了阿拉丁的种子。”

在接下来的六年里,有继续demand for BlackRock’s risk management services, and by the late ’90s, institutional investors were interested in installing BlackRock’s operating system at their own organizations. That first external implementation of the Aladdin platform was finished in 2000, and with it BlackRock Solutions was born.

As BlackRock explained in that year’s annual report, the goal of the Solutions business was to “leverage the investments BlackRock has made over the past 13 years in developing a highly sophisticated portfolio management system. . . . In effect, clients are offered the same capabilities that support BlackRock.”

By the end of that year, the firm’s “assets under risk management” exceeded $1.3 trillion.

“我们所做的是独一无二的，是什么让它独特的事实是我们，Blackrock是平台最大的用户，”Goldstein说。“这概念'我们吃自己的烹饪'为我们带来了比我们在市场上看到的更高的学科。我认为这是强烈的共鸣。“

同样与客户共振是Aladdin平台的广度和深度，支持所有主要资产类别的全方位投资功能。

“不仅提供风险透明度，而且还提供了建模交易的能力，捕获交易，以管理投资组合来管理投资组合合规性 - ”工作流程的所有操作组件“，”G​​oldstein说。“这是一个全面，奇异的企业平台，而是一个模特，你正在拼凑很多东西，试图弄清楚如何接口它们。”

在传统上是非常碎片的市场中，BlackRock提供集成的多用途平台的能力已经证明了前瞻性客户的强大销售点 - 即使它是针对执行特定功能的竞争对手。

Take CalSTRS, for example. Ten years after the pension fund’s fixed-income team adopted Aladdin, its global equities team went on the hunt for a portfolio management system of its own. The decision, as portfolio manager David Murphy describes it, came down to two options: Hire the best-of-breed provider, or use the same platform as the fixed-income team. In the end, the ease of a consolidated system won out.

“It’s a single integrated platform for CalSTRS’ investment staff,” Murphy says. “It’s nice to have that seamless platform which provides functionality usually found with a best-of-breed–type solution.”

There are only a “very limited” number of providers that can truly support the full range of investment operations on a single system, according to Claudio Prutz, who leads digital efforts at Munich Re’s internal asset management arm. One is BlackRock, and another is SimCorp. Prutz says his firm, MEAG, has been using SimCorp’s Dimension since 1999, when MEAG was first spun off from the German reinsurance company. Today the asset manager uses the SimCorp platform across nearly all aspects of its business, from performance measurement and risk management to trading and settlement. Just about the only thing that’s not run on Dimension is MEAG’s special ledger, which the asset manager manages on SAP.

“A very high value in using not only SimCorp Dimension but any integrated platform is the standardization of processes and the integration of data,” Prutz says. “That brings not only cost efficiency, but also more insight and trust in the data. The same information is used by everyone in the organization.”

It’s a viewpoint shared by a large proportion of institutional investors. According to SimCorp, 38 percent of the 200 largest investment managers are Dimension users. Among the top 50, nearly half are SimCorp clients. (BlackRock, by comparison, says Aladdin serves about 20 percent of top 200 asset managers globally, 23 percent of the top 100 pension funds in the U.S., and 17 percent of the world’s 250 largest insurance companies.)

And Dimension continues to attract new clients: Just the other week, SimCorp announced another bank had signed on to use Dimension in its balance sheet operations.

“使用韦恩·格雷茨基的类比,他常说that he would skate to where the puck was going to be, and not to where the puck has been,” says SimCorp’s Corrigan. “We’ve been skating to where the industry is moving. And we think it’s moving toward us.”

If the industry does continue to consolidate, specialized portfolio software — in compliance systems, for example, or back-office support — could be squeezed out.

Some providers are responding to this threat by doubling down on what they do best. MSCI, for instance, continues to invest in its popular portfolio analytics business, this year launching new tools for factor analysis and environmental, social, and governance investing. “We’re never going to finish investing in this thing, because the state of the art is constantly moving,” says Jorge Mina, MSCI’s head of analytics.

同时，其他提供者正试图通过扩大自己的产品产品 - 通过收购来匹配阿拉丁和维度等竞争对手。投资组合软件公司SS＆C Technologies已将其全部经营战略集中在购买其他公司，在过去的23年中收购了51个企业。

最新的竞争对手迈向全方位服务的前回产品是查尔斯河，已被国家街道收购。该交易将与Charles River广泛使用的前台软件与州街的后台和中间专业知识结合起来。

“By integrating Charles River’s tools, we will provide our clients access to standardized, real-time data from a single platform, enabling them to analyze and understand their investments holistically and make it easier for them to put their data to use,” State Street says in a statement to亚博赞助欧冠。

在查尔斯河平台上已经管理的机构和财富资产25万亿美元，此次收购可以创造一个强大的新竞争对手。尽管如此，Simcorp的Corrigan似乎看起来不太担心。

“They’re still having multiple platforms that they have to stitch together, a very different philosophy and approach to SimCorp,” he notes.

State Street, for its part, seems to be positioning its forthcoming platform as more of a complementary service, noting that the platform would be able to “connect and exchange data with other industry platforms and providers” such as Aladdin, “for which State Street will strive to be the custodian of choice.”

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除非发生了剧烈的事情——阿拉丁未能预测一个灾难性的风险,或the client data entrusted to the operating system becomes compromised — BlackRock’s hold on existing clients may be difficult to break. As MEAG’s Prutz points out, platforms like Aladdin and Dimension tend to be long-term commitments.

“Once you have opted for such a platform — and this is not unique to SimCorp — you are bound to it because you invest a lot of money and that should pay out over time,” he says. “You have to build trust very fast, as over the years it becomes more difficult to change because your processes adapt to the system.”

Now BlackRock strives to make its tools indispensable forwealth management firms。“We’re trying to give the power of Aladdin to financial advisers and distribution providers,” COO Goldstein says.

Since Aladdin’s entry into the retail space last year, BlackRock says the technology has been adopted by a handful of new clients, including divisions like UBS Global Wealth Management and Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

瑞银单位是第一个将阿拉丁介绍其业务的财务咨询公司，该决策咨询解决方案Head Michael Mcvicker描述为其客户和财务顾问的“巨大成功”。

“It’s been very well received into the field,” he says. “It’s a very user-friendly tool, and it’s enabled advisers to do a better job.”

摩根斯坦利财富管理评论同样积极呈现，与Blackrock合作，建立由Aladdin的风险分析引擎的定制平台。Chris Scott-Hansen，投资组合和交易解决方案负责人表示，Blackrock允许其财务顾问监控客户的整个投资组合的风险 - 而不仅仅是他们的资产由摩根士丹利管理。

斯科特 - 汉森说：“业务和客户投资组合中的风险透明度被放大”。“对于财务顾问，这是一个巨大的差异化因素。它们可以更精确，令人难以置信的准确，风险。“

但即使Blackrock推动了财富管理竞技场，它也不会从努力中拉回来继续赢得机构投资者。亚博赞助欧冠

“The reality is we have very few clients relative to the number of opportunities in the world,” Goldstein says. “We’re just getting started.”