Turning an Aladdin Rollout into Business-Wide Value

How Strata helped a Pan-Asia investment business get more from its Aladdin platform

One of Asia’s largest insurers, with a substantial internal asset-management arm, had successfully gone live on BlackRock’s Aladdin Enterprise platform. The implementation delivered its core foundations on schedule. Strata’s role was to help translate that foundation into tangible value for investment teams across the business.

Strata built clear, unified reporting that turned Aladdin into a more useful day-to-day tool for the investment teams. Leaders and end users made sharper decisions, with more consistency and more confidence in the platform.

The Challenge: Configuring the platform to excel

The client’s Aladdin implementation had put in place a solid baseline, but deeper team-specific reporting was needed to get more from the platform. In practice, this meant making sure the Explore workspaces reflected how the client’s investment teams worked, across different regions and asset classes.

Even with baseline training in place, client teams found themselves overwhelmed by where to start on the new platform. Reporting risked becoming disjointed and too generic for daily investment use in such a diverse organisation, and teams were struggling to translate their current-state reporting views and ways of working into an Aladdin-native approach.

The client also didn’t have the in-house expertise to design and configure the platform to best-practice standards on its own. With numerous teams spread across different offices and regions, coordinating a consistent approach to problem-solving was a challenge in itself. Left unaddressed, there was a risk that use of the platform would diminish rather than build towards the uplift originally intended for end users.

The client needed a partner who could understand the problem from both senior and end-user perspectives. That partner also needed to work across numerous teams to build a coherent plan, and deliver a reporting model that worked across the entire business.

The Solution: Design, build and deploy

We took a hybrid advisory-plus-delivery approach, combining Aladdin specialism with APAC/Singapore-based regional expertise. We started with an assessment phase to understand the problem, before applying our design, build, deploy delivery methodology.

Discovery –

We met with senior leaders, from the CIO office to heads of desk, to understand what good reporting looked like and which teams were in scope. From those sessions, we agreed an enterprise and team-level reporting design upfront, giving every investment team a consistent plan to work from, alongside a project tracker and delivery plan.

That top-down view was paired with detailed bottom-up work. Portfolio managers and super-users walked our consultants through their day-to-day reporting needs and the gaps they were experiencing in the newly implemented platform. We also reviewed existing Explore workspaces, the reporting inputs available, the workspaces teams were using, and any examples they’d built themselves, to understand what was working, what wasn’t and what could be improved.

By the end of this phase, the client had a clear picture of the state of play and a practical plan for how to build on the core implementation.

Design, build and deploy –

These insights shaped the design and build of each team’s Explore workspace. Every investment team received its own Gold Copy workspace, a best-practice, platform-native reporting environment built for its specific needs.

The workspaces gave senior leaders clarity across the business, unifying reporting while still reflecting the granular realities of local and portfolio-level reporting.

A long-term solution –

Each workspace went through several rounds of feedback with the investment teams, evolving until senior leaders were satisfied and formally signed off that their Gold Copy workspace had been deployed. Once deployed, we ran training and handover sessions so end-user owners understood how the Gold Copy workspaces operated, how to maintain them and how to adapt them as needs changed.

Delivery was deliberately run in step with the client’s broader implementation. Rather than a single rollout, we synced our work to the go-live milestones of key business units, so teams felt the uplift as soon as they went live rather than waiting for a later phase. Over the course of a year, this rhythm let the client build on its Aladdin foundation without adding to the pressure of the core implementation.

Our aim was to make sure Aladdin kept delivering value long after the project finished. By the time we stepped away, the workspaces were fully in the client’s hands, and reporting had become something teams could shape and grow themselves.

The Results: Delivered Best-in-Class Investment Reporting Framework

Strata designed and delivered comprehensive strategic investment reports that strengthened adherence to investment targets, improved transparency and data integrity, and gave investment teams the tools and insights needed to manage portfolios and meet stakeholder expectations.

The project put in place a reporting system that delivered value straight away, and a strong foundation for future growth.

Key achievements:

• Implemented an enterprise-wide reporting framework for the CIO and Front Office Portfolio Management teams, providing consistent, accurate, and timely insights into portfolio performance and investment activity.
• Designed and delivered best-in-class Explore reporting solutions tailored to the specific needs of each investment team, enabling comprehensive monitoring, management, and analysis of investment activity.
• Established a robust governance and training framework for report administration and tool management, equipping designated super users with the knowledge, standards, and controls required to maintain reporting integrity.
• Ensured that report configurations, data definitions, and system settings were managed consistently, safeguarded against unintended changes, and aligned with agreed governance principles and promoted the accuracy, reliability and sustainability of the reports.
• Enhanced SAA governance through automated reporting and control mechanisms, enabling proactive oversight and improved adherence to investment and strategic objectives.
• Improved stakeholder transparency and reporting effectiveness by providing intuitive, self-service reporting capabilities and standardised management information for users.
• Built a scalable and sustainable reporting architecture, reducing operational risk, increasing efficiency, and supporting future business growth and evolving investment requirements.

Want the same clarity from your Aladdin implementation?

Get in touch to talk through what a Gold Copy reporting model could look like for your business.