In total, Aladdin watches over a vast sum, rivaling the U.S. gross domestic product of more than $18 trillion.

More Opportunity

BlackRock’s more recent plan grew out of an internal hackathon about three years ago. Engineers paved the way for a new product, called Aladdin for Wealth, which flipped the business model. While the traditional Aladdin software examines data on millions of securities for large accounts, the wealth product helps brokers and investment advisers analyze client accounts invested in a more limited pool of securities, such as mutual funds.

That’s an area it can mine for opportunity. If Aladdin spots gaps or undue risk in portfolios, BlackRock can be in a good position to promote -- and sell -- its products, especially low-fee ETFs and index funds that clients on Main Street crave.

“This is something more holistic, which is where the industry’s going,” said Kyle Sanders, an analyst at Edward Jones. “There’s more demand for that now than there was five or ten years ago."

BlackRock has also decided for the first time to open up part of the platform to engineers within its client organizations too, in an effort to further embed the software in their day-to-day business. Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, sells financial software that competes on certain fronts with Aladdin.

Systemic Risk?

Competitors say Aladdin is becoming its own kind of risk. One recurring criticism of the software is that it could lead to a kind of groupthink about risk. With hundreds of clients relying on it, Aladdin could gravitate toward similar conclusions or fail to recognize common blind spots, critics contend.

SimCorp A/S of Copenhagen sells risk software that competes with Aladdin. Its chief executive, Klaus Holse, said some of his clients shun Aladdin because they “don’t want to enter into the systemic risk of being with BlackRock. If that for some reason fails, then everyone fails.”

Some SimCorp clients have raised concerns about BlackRock because they “don’t want to fund a competitor,” he said.

BlackRock’s Goldstein said such criticism is unfounded as Aladdin isn’t a one-size-fits-all risk tool. Each customer uses it in distinctive ways and rather than dictating behavior, it functions more like “a dashboard, in terms of how people drive a car,” he said.

The software is crucial to the asset manager’s future, he added. Hoping to impress that upon shareholders at investor day, Goldstein stood in front of a giant projection screen that displayed the words “ALADDIN IS BLACKROCK.”