BlackRock and Snowflake Partner to Unlock Deeper Insights on Aladdin

BlackRock, a leading asset manager with over $11 trillion in assets under management, strives to help everyone experience financial well-being. The company’s technology platform, Aladdin, unifies the investment management process, providing a common data language within an organization to enable scale, provide insights and support business transformation. Aladdin technology enables complex data aggregation across public and private markets — powering scale and data-driven decisions for 150+ of the world’s leading financial institutions.

The partnership with Snowflake further enhances the firm’s ability to deliver timely, reliable data that informs its clients’ decision-making. Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud is a core component of some of the organization’s key commercial offerings, such as Aladdin® Data Cloud (ADC), which is Aladdin’s managed data-as-a-service platform that provides investment professionals with a scalable way to integrate data from multiple sources and accelerate innovation.

With Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud as part of BlackRock’s internal architecture, there’s a single source for the ingestion, storage and organization of first- and third-party data. Millions of derived analytics from BlackRock’s proprietary processes are stored within Snowflake and distributed through reports, dashboards and applications within the organization.

With clients becoming increasingly interested in vast amounts of data for historical analysis, access to near real-time information is essential for a company like BlackRock.

BlackRock’s previous data warehouse solution offered a structured approach for analytics, but as the firm continued to evolve to support clients' data needs at scale, it required a more robust data storage platform. “We needed a repository at a different scale to start calculating, landing and recording an infinite time series of risk analytics every day,” says Jeff Miller, Global Head of Data Factory & Enterprise Data Platforms at BlackRock. “We chose Snowflake as the platform to support our goals and enhance the investment management process.” 

Since moving to a streamlined, single source of data in Snowflake, BlackRock has onboarded additional data while supporting use cases requiring large data sets. This transition has also better prepared BlackRock for an AI-powered future that has increased data engineering demands. For example, BlackRock, Snowflake and other leading industry partners recently announced a commitment to lead the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) — a new initiative aiming to introduce a common, vendor-neutral semantic model that standardizes metadata across systems. This will not only streamline data exchange across firms and teams but will also accelerate AI adoption throughout the finance industry.

Snowflake now plays a key role in BlackRock's internal infrastructure. The firm’s enterprise data platform (EDP) is an end-to-end pipeline that centralizes data from millions of files received nightly from index providers, security reference data providers and other organizations. These files support both Aladdin for all clients, as well as BlackRock the asset manager. BlackRock can land all this data once into a single, consistent EDP, then efficiently distribute it to BlackRock’s analytics factory, local Aladdin environments and, ultimately, Aladdin Data Cloud. 

Snowflake’s near-instant, near-infinite scaling of storage and compute makes it the logical repository for BlackRock’s calculation-derived data, including millions of records that the company’s risk analytics engine generates daily. “Snowflake helps us store our massive volumes of data at scale,” says Graham Carle, Technical Fellow and Managing Director at BlackRock. “The Snowflake platform gives us the flexibility to meet client needs and deliver specific use cases, in addition to helping us release frequent updates while avoiding additional development costs.” 

By using Snowflake, BlackRock can effectively lower its overhead costs of transferring data between Aladdin applications, which thousands of end users rely on worldwide to unify and scale their insights.

Integrating the Aladdin platform’s accounting book of record (ABOR) and investment book of record (IBOR) with other third-party data sets has enhanced the reporting experience. “Rather than getting files, now clients get a database out of the box on Day 1,” Bernadette Rivosecchi, Managing Director, BlackRock, says. “You turn it on, and their positions and trades are there.”

Snowflake’s ability to provide a single, seamless experience across multiple public clouds aligns with BlackRock’s need to support a variety of client data environments. This infrastructure allows BlackRock to offer Aladdin Data Cloud as a fully managed solution within the cloud and region of choice, enabling flexibility and cohesiveness. 

Snowflake’s secure data sharing and standardized data pipeline methodology also supports BlackRock’s ability to securely and efficiently ingest data from major financial data providers to further enrich Aladdin Data Cloud and bring value to clients. “The speed at which we can onboard new data and make it available to our clients is much faster than before,” says Miller. “Snowflake’s unique sharing and separation of storage and compute helps us to deliver this value.” 

Securely accessing governed data from Aladdin Data Cloud empowers BlackRock’s clients to make data-driven decisions involving portfolio management, trade execution, investment operations, analysis and risk management. And since BlackRock handles governance and maintenance of its Aladdin platform, clients can free up their technical teams to build applications, automate workflows and surface investment insights, rather than focus on data operations and transformation.

Continuing to increase investment professionals’ access to data is a top priority for BlackRock. Offering more “out-of-the-box” dashboards, data applications and other analytics solutions will make it easier to extend Aladdin Data Cloud and support additional use cases. Integrating third-party data sets, such as returns information and earnings estimates, could help clients uncover new insights. 

The data platform has transitioned from an operational tool to a strategic priority — playing a critical role in driving insight and innovation in an increasingly AI-enabled investment ecosystem. David Woodhead, Head of Aladdin Studio Engineering, BlackRock, spoke of how Snowflake has helped enable that transition: “Snowflake is central to our strategy of delivering a whole-portfolio data solution, unifying public and private markets data oriented around the portfolio. It enables the scale, intelligence and flexibility to realize this vision, and through data sharing, we can seamlessly deliver data products directly to our clients whether they use our Snowflake environment or their own.”

The partnership with Snowflake remains especially pertinent as BlackRock further explores evolving AI technologies — solutions that could further transform internal operations and the client experience through enhanced data discoverability.