BlackRock Earnings Call Highlights
BlackRock Q4 Earnings Conference Call featured a couple of mentions of money funds and the recent acquisition of Cachematrix (see our June 28 News, "BlackRock to Acquire Money Fund Trading Portal Tech Firm Cachematrix. (See the Seeking Alpha transcript here.) On the call, CFO Gary Shedlin says, "We accelerated the expansion of our technology portfolio during 2017 with the acquisition of Cachematrix and minority investments in iCapital and Scalable Capital. Our investments in technology and data will enhance our ability to generate alpha and more efficiently serve clients, resulting in growth in both base fees and technology revenue." He adds, "Finally, BlackRock's cash management platform saw $38 billion of net inflows or 9% organic growth for the year, reflecting continued market share gains and several large wins. The strong growth in cash management also reflects successful identification and integration of acquisitions to strengthen our platform and leverage our scale.... During 2017, our differentiated platform delivered 7% long-term organic base fee growth, 9% organic asset growth in our cash platform, and 14% growth in our technology and risk management revenue." During the Q&A, CEO Larry Fink commented, "So I don't want to suggest it's one thing, but it's a multitude of all the things that we've been investing in, working in, investing in that is creating a better, deeper or consistent dialog with more financial advisors. You mentioned Cachematrix. That's not a delivery system for ETFs, but it is a very strong delivery system for us to connect with banks and the bank channels for them to drive more cash and money market types of products into the BlackRock platform, and that's one of the reasons why we had accelerated growth in our cash management platform in 2017. And we expect a furthering of opportunities in our cash management business."
