BlackRock Aladdin - Competitors and Alternatives

In this article, we highlight some competitors and alternatives to BlackRock’s Aladdin. Our goal with the article is to assist investment managers like you who are researching which solutions to include in a procurement.

BlackRock Aladdin pricing can be a challenge. It's both a deep and broad platform covering sophisticated workflows front-to-back, and priced accordingly.

When evaluating functional coverage of competitors and alternatives to Aladdin, there has historically only been two options:

1. Sophisticated but complex
   Aladdin is built to service the world’s most sophisticated and largest asset managers. The downside is that the system is complex and hard to understand and pricing can be an obstacle.
2. Too simple
   Some vendors are front-to-back systems as well, but lack the sophisticated level of Aladdin.

The team at Limina, as former investment managers, understands the challenges of selecting a system. While we offer powerful investment management software, we believe in providing an unbiased overview. Consequently, we won't include ourselves in the comparison, but we encourage you to explore Limina’s solutions as a viable choice based on your unique requirements.

We’ve tried to make it easy for you to confirm whether Limina is a match for you or if Limina might not be your best choice.

SimCorp Dimension is a front-to-back system used by large investment management companies. The platform supports various asset classes and caters to global investment strategies.

Online reviews highlight data management capabilities and their own marketing emphasise the IBOR - compared to Aladdin.

Charles River Development's Investment Management Solution (IMS) is a robust competitor to Blackrock Aladdin enabling firms to optimise a large part of their investment processes. It has a broad functional set, including order and execution management and compliance monitoring.

Charles River services mostly large asset managers but also mid-sized managers. Online reviews note that scalability and flexibility of the solution are strong points.

Bloomberg is a trusted name in the financial industry, and their Trade Order Management System (OMS) Asset and Investment Manager (“Bloomberg AIM”) covers part of an Investment Management Solution scope. Bloomberg's solution suite also includes portfolio management capabilities through its product Bloomberg PORT.

Bloomberg AIM comes with extensive market data coverage included through the Bloomberg terminal, which all users must have.

Thinkfolio by S&P Markit is a software for portfolio management, modelling and order management. In that sense it's narrower than Blackrock Aladdin and doesn't contain an IBOR

Thinkfolio aims to enhance portfolio visibility and improve decision-making processes. The software started in Fixed Income but now covers multiple asset classes.

Thinkfolio was acquired by Markit in 2014, and then Markit was, in turn, acquired by S&P in 2022.

SS&C Advent has a set of solutions, for example:

1. APX for portfolio administration and CRM capabilities
2. Moxy for order management capabilities
3. Genesis for portfolio management capabilities
4. Rules Builder for pre- and post-trade compliance controls
5. Geneva for portfolio accounting

The solutions integrate to enable end-to-end workflows.

Similar to Advent, Eze offers various solutions for different parts of the investment lifecycle:

Eze EMS (formerly known as RealTick) for execution management capabilities

Eze OMS for order management capabilities, including compliance

Eze PMS (formerly known as Tradar) for portfolio accounting

Just like Advent, Eze has been acquired by SS&C.