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BACKGROUND
A global asset manager had multiple vendor and proprietary trading systems to support equity and fixed income trading. The firm struggled to get a timely, accurate and holistic view of trading activity and decided to standardize by implementing a single instance of BlackRock’s Aladdin globally. Functional scope for the full Aladdin suite included trading for equity, fixed income, private placements, derivatives, compliance, external trading platform connectivity, risk and analytics.
Stakeholders and project interface included portfolio managers, traders, quants, and program management in North America, Europe, and Asia. Meradia was engaged to provide project management and hands-on business analyst support to communicate and successfully facilitate the complex needs of front office individuals globally to BlackRock. This naturally led to the interpretation of Aladdin’s capabilities leading into the testing and education immersion with the front office.
ANALYSIS
Meradia was engaged from project kick-off through go-live over the course of 20 months to facilitate the implementation of Aladdin globally. Our engagement initiated with a detailed analysis of current trading process workflow requiring extensive intake and coordination between the front office and BlackRock to gain an understanding and future state approach. Offering experience and collaboration, we were active participants in the design of the portfolio structures that became the core of optimizing connectivity across the Aladdin modules. In addition to supporting the front office, we collaborated with other workstream teams:
- Data team responsible for security level data, with support from the front office team around the nuances, custom needs, interpretations and resulting analytics.
- Testing team and their approach required careful consideration by the front office in terms of use cases for their futures state. Failure to efficiently anticipate and successfully execute properly could lead to significant negative discoveries that could impact development at a late stage in the program.
- Training requirements are the biggest ongoing time commitment for the front office. It is an iterative process and intense to execute in a BAU trading environment.
RESULTS
Successful Aladdin implementations require experienced resources. In our role as project manager and business analyst in the middle of the front office team, Meradia’s know-how helped streamline the communications between the portfolio managers, traders, and quants resulting in an on-time implementation. Our business and application knowledge was critical to the coordination between the front office, data, testing, and training teams. We were able to successfully:
- Document the current state of disparate functional and regional system workflows
- Collaborate to implement the front office future state road map on Aladdin globally
- Efficiently translate the needs of the business users to the BlackRock Aladdin team while they conducted BAU
- Minimize trade risk and downtime