A greater level of desktop application interoperability between buy- and sell-side firms may be coming as BlackRock and Morgan Stanley embraced an open source standard overseen by the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), which held its annual Open Source in Finance Forum in New York City (OSFF NY) last week. The standard known as FDC3… Read More >>
Franklin Templeton to Deploy BlackRock’s Aladdin
Asset manager Franklin Templeton will be deploying the Aladdin platform from BlackRock to unify its investment management IT infrastructures across public market asset classes, officials say. The Aladdin portfolio management software offers investment firms “a way to view and manage daily investments,” according to BlackRock. “Aladdin is a comprehensive technology solution that supports the entire… Read More >>
Schroders Taps Xceptor to Manage Aladdin Data Flows
The London-based Schroders deployed the data automation offerings of Xceptor to move much of its key business onto the BlackRock Aladdin investment operations platform and wound up using Xceptor again for processes not involving Aladdin. “Schroders’ strategic aim was to get as much of their business onto Blackrock Aladdin and their core supporting platform,” Josh… Read More >>
SmartStream Picks a New CEO & Other News
Akber Jaffer Replaces Haytham Kaddoura as CEO SmartStream, the post-trade operations solutions provider, has appointed Akber Jaffer as its new chief executive officer (CEO), effective September 19. Jaffer replaces Haytham Kaddoura, who has stepped down from the CEO post. Kaddoura will join SmartStream’s board. Jaffer has “spent several years immersed in both start-up and scaled… Read More >>
Aladdin Links to LTX’s Liquidity Cloud & Other News
Aladdin & LTX Users Get Cross-Platform Access BlackRock’s Aladdin platform has a new channel to liquidity via its integration with the Liquidity Cloud offering from LTX, a subsidiary of Broadridge Financial Solutions, and the link helps common clients of LTX and Aladdin to access trading functions of both platforms, officials report. LTX is a… Read More >>
BlackRock Tops the Broadridge FB50 List
Despite volatile markets last year, the current Fund Brand 50 (FB50) rankings of the best-performing, third-party asset management brands revealed that seven of the top 10 asset managers held the same position in 2022 as they did the year before. The annual study is sponsored by Broadridge Financial Solutions, a provider of securities operations systems,… Read More >>
SimCorp Faces a Horse Race in North America: Q&A
(Editor’s note: Investment management solutions vendor SimCorp, based in Copenhagen, recently announced that it had hired John Needham to be its next managing director for SimCorp North America. An industry veteran with 25 years of experience, Needham had been working for trading and risk management provider Murex in a senior leadership position before joining SimCorp…. Read More >>
Insurers to Ramp Up Investment Management IT: Survey
Asset and liability management, compliance, and market data top global insurers’ lists of planned technology investments, according to a new BlackRock survey. In fact, insurers plan to speed up digital transformation over the next 12 to 24 months as they wrestle with rapidly changing markets, according to the survey. Sixty-five percent of insurers surveyed see… Read More >>
19 State AGs Oppose BlackRock’s ESG Pension Push
Another anti-ESG push from the right is emerging and this time it’s taking aim at what is arguably the world’s largest asset manager. The attorney general for the Grand Canyon state Mark Brnovich earlier this month created “a coalition of 19 states that sent a letter to BlackRock Inc., calling out its practices of putting… Read More >>
BlackRock Vet Joins Arcesium & Other News
Arcesium Hires from BlackRock Arcesium reports that it has hired the former commercial director for BlackRock’s Aladdin Data Cloud, Mahesh Narayan, to be the institutional asset manager segment head for the data management solutions vendor. Narayan will oversee Arcesium’s “cloud-native data platform, investment lifecycle solutions, and associated financial operations,” according to the official announcement. These… Read More >>
