BlackRock and Snowflake Partner to Unlock the Value of Data for the Investment Management Industry

To make the best investment decisions for their clients, investment managers need to be able to access and analyze reliable data quickly. According to McKinsey, asset management firms are using advanced analytics to increase revenues by 5–30% as a result of data-driven prospecting and segmentation. They are also lowering costs by 10–30% through increased process automation, automated trade surveillance, and decreased costs for data management. But despite significant investments in data management and analytics capabilities, investment managers face challenges in leveraging data and analytics at scale. 

In the investment management industry, data is often siloed in multiple systems. This makes it difficult for companies to collect and aggregate portfolio data from different repositories and utilize it efficiently. Because investment management workflows are not built to leverage data automatically, they can sometimes be highly manual. Finally, legacy technology systems can’t scale to the demands of the modern financial ecosystem. While many firms have tried to make their legacy systems work, they have ended up with complexity, technical debt, and processes, governance, and skills that bear higher long-term costs and are not optimized to compete in this data-driven era.

BlackRock has been focused on tackling these challenges for the last 3 decades through its Aladdin offering. An end-to-end investment management platform, Aladdin creates a single source of quality-controlled data and standard investment workflows for teams across the organization. Aladdin’s single system approach creates a “common language of portfolios”, enabling clients to retire a web of legacy systems, interfaces, and offline spreadsheets. 

As a next step in enabling Aladdin clients to further unlock the full potential of their data, BlackRock has announced Aladdin Data Cloud, which is powered by Snowflake and is a strategic part of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. This managed data solution will allow companies to combine Aladdin portfolio data with non-Aladdin data, analyze it faster, and create custom applications and dashboards using Aladdin Studio—BlackRock’s platform for developers. With analysis-ready data, preloaded with rich front-to-back Aladdin data sets, and reporting built for investment teams, organizations will have a single control plane to make data-driven decisions around portfolio management, trade execution, investment operations, analysis, and risk management.

BlackRock is partnering with Snowflake to power Aladdin Data Cloud because Snowflake’s robust technology platform provides near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Data is freed from silos and stored in a central, unified location, enabling easier access, faster insights that lead to more informed investment decisions, and better client experiences. The powerful capabilities of Snowflake’s Data Cloud will enable Aladdin clients to supercharge their use of data across their organization by enabling them to align their investments data strategy with their broader cloud and data strategy.

"Applications that give everyone in the organization timely access to data—that they can easily analyze—will create a competitive advantage. Aladdin Data Cloud powered by Snowflake will do this for the investment management industry,” said Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products, Benoit Dageville. "With Snowflake’s simple yet powerful architecture, businesses can disrupt their industries by mobilizing the world’s data in their own applications."

In addition, Aladdin Data Cloud powered by Snowflake frees up investment professionals and technology teams so they can focus on value-added activities. There’s no technical complexity and operational burden; it offers simple-to-manage access control and flexible, powerful customization. And it includes around-the-clock operational and exceptions monitoring improving data governance and security. 

Ultimately, BlackRock and Snowflake intend to provide investment managers with a differentiated solution that can help them unlock the value of data across their subsidiaries, business ecosystems, and geographies and empower creativity and innovation.

"We’re thrilled to be a strategic partner to BlackRock to power a robust data platform for investment managers,” said Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake. “With Aladdin as a strategic part of Snowflake Data Cloud, our goal is to create a new industry standard in financial services for accessing, governing and acting on data in a unified and secure data environment.”

For more information, read the official announcement.

Learn more about Aladdin Data Cloud. 

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the Aladdin Data Cloud, which is under development, and the expected capabilities and benefits of the Aladdin Data Cloud. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors” in the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q Snowflake filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 3, 2020. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, the future events discussed in this blog post may not occur and actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forwarding-looking statements as predictions of future events. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this blog post and Snowflake undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof.