⚠ The Platform Can Take the Tools and the FeesModerate threat

The wealth platforms Aladdin Wealth serves are large, sophisticated, and increasingly in the manufacturing business themselves. Several run their own model portfolios, several own asset managers, and all of them understand that the analytics layer is where product selection gets influenced.

That makes the relationship inherently unstable at the top end. A platform that concludes BlackRock's tools are steering flow toward BlackRock's funds has a straightforward response: license a neutral vendor's analytics instead, or build them, and keep the manufacturing margin. The switching cost here is far lower than for enterprise Aladdin, because the adviser desktop is a presentation layer rather than the firm's book of record.

BlackRock's protection is that it reaches retail through intermediaries¹ in a genuinely fragmented market — thousands of independent advisory firms with no capacity to build anything, for whom BlackRock's tools are a straightforward upgrade. The concentration risk sits at the large national platforms, which is also where most of the assets are.

The number that matters is not disclosed separately and would be the most useful one BlackRock could publish: what share of retail flow arrives through platforms where BlackRock supplies the analytics, and whether that share is rising. In its absence, watch for a major wealth platform announcing an in-house or third-party replacement.