LAUREN: BlackRock is known because they’re the world’s largest asset management company. But at the same time, what keeps BlackRock going is their technology. We’re here on Wall Street, but we’re here in Silicon Valley, and we’re killing it in both spaces I think is what makes them pretty innovative.
CONNOR: Joining a big Wall Street firm, you kind of expect this very tough, old school finance mentality, and it’s just not the case. BlackRock is incredibly innovative in the industry, because we are really focused on bringing technology into the industry.
PRANAV: The amount of opportunities for new technology, like machine learning and big data analysis– it really makes working at an institute like BlackRock that much more exciting. It’s not every day that you get to join an organization that works at such enormous scale and with the most cutting edge of technology, because the problems that we have to work for are enormous in their own scope and require the very best solutions.
JOHN: We’re really sort of active in the technology space and making it applicable to– whether it’s our working environment, whether it’s products that we’re offering to clients, whether it’s ways of educating our investors. And I think that’s really exciting.
TYRON: Aladdin is the core operational platform used at BlackRock.
JOSEPH: The best way to describe Aladdin is to think of it as the collective intelligence of the firm that support portfolio managers, traders, analysts, operations folks, to perform the front-to-back actions of an asset manager.
NISHA: We at BlackRock constantly innovate using technology. Every year, we run hackathon global code tech fest to get people closer to technology so that even if you cannot code, you can understand technology and use that to solve your business problems.
JOSEPH: You get developers talking to business users they would normally never interact with. You get new networks formed. And then the nicest thing is to see those bonds and those networks taken forward in the days and weeks after the hackathon. We see lots of that.
ALEXIS: To me, the impact of what we enable our sales people to do is pretty impressive. From just using their iPads, they can– through hackathons and things like that, we have some pretty amazing tools that they can use to impact our clients.
CHRIS: One of the best things about BlackRock is we don’t think too much about the financial industry or what the rest of the industry is doing. We’re purely focused on how we can innovate, how we can leverage technology, and how we can deliver for our clients.
DANIEL: How can we make the big world of investing feel smaller and feel more easy to understand is a great challenge for engineers.
TYRON: It’s an open landscape. There is so much to build. There are so many challenges that we need to face, and we’re looking forward to it. It’s going to allow us to provide premium service to all of our clients.