The ETF giant missed an opportunity years ago to build its version of the App Store for Capital Markets-related financial technology.
BlackRock (tkr: BLK), announced a partnership with Snowflake (tkr: SNOW), earlier this week. Per the partnership BlackRock will introduce Aladdin Data Cloud where clients may access pre-defined Aladdin data sets, proprietary client data and third party data all on top of Snowflake’s Data Cloud platform (which sits on top of AWS, Azure and GCP).
BlackRock’s investment technology division had the opportunity years ago to be Snowflake for Financial Services. Taking it a step further, BlackRock had the opportunity to be AWS, Azure and GCP. However, investment technology is not core to BlackRock’s overall business. Therefore, it is not a surprise that BLK missed the cloud opportunity. Instead, BlackRock is relegated to junior partner status, helping Snowflake build the platform that BlackRock should have owned.