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 and in
Silicon Valley and we're killing it in
both spaces. I think this is what makes them
pretty innovative. Joining a big Wall
Street firm you kind of expect in this
very tough, old-school finance mentality
and it's just not the case.
BlackRock's incredibly innovative in the
industry because we are really focused
on bringing technology into the industry.
The amount of opportunities for new
technology like machine learning and big
data analysis--it really makes working at
an issue 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 at are
enormous in their own scope and require
the very best solutions. We're really
so 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 that's really exciting.
Aladdin is the core operational platform
used at BlackRock. The best way to
describe Aladdin is to think of it as a
collective intelligence of the firm that
support portfolio managers, traders,
analysts, operations folks to perform the
front-to-back
actions of an asset manager. We at
BlackRock constantly innovate using
technology. Every year we run a hackathon
 tech fest to get people closer
to technology so that even if you cannot
coach you can understand technology and
use that to solve your business problems.
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
bonds and those networks taken forward
and the days and weeks after the
hackathon. We see us of that. To me the
impact of what we enable our salespeople
to do is pretty impressive from you know
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. One of the
best things about BlackRock is that 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.
How can we make you know the big world
of investing feel smaller and feel more
easy to understand is a great challenge
for engineers. It's an open landscape,
there's 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 premier service
to all of our clients.
