The 2014 Tech 50: Robert Goldstein

July 08, 2014

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< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

Robert Goldstein

Chief Operating Officer

BlackRock

Last year: 11

Challenging times for investors — whether because of regulatory complications or asset prices moving in unexpected ways — present growth opportunities for asset management giant BlackRock and particularly BlackRock Solutions (BRS), the systems and advisory unit Robert Goldstein has headed since 2009. BlackRock “helps people understand and gain transparency into their portfolios and associated processing activities,” he explains. “Everything happening in the world, from continued liquidity challenges to the increased correlations between asset classes, comes back to transparency.” Demand from other firms for trading, analytics and risk management solutions helped push BRS’s revenue up 11 percent last year, to $577 million. Now the unit is considering extending its capabilities to a broader audience, such as financial advisers, says the 40-year-old Goldstein, who joined New York–based BlackRock as an analyst in 1994 with a BS in economics from New York State’s Binghamton University. He climbed the ranks to become global head of institutional client business in 2012 and, effective July 2014, to COO — all the while running BRS. Goldstein helped launch the unit in 2000 under the leadership of Charles Hallac, the architect of BRS’s flagship Aladdin investment platform and now co-president of BlackRock. Pursuing technology-assisted solutions to the fixed-income-liquidity puzzle, BlackRock has formed partnerships linking its Aladdin Trading Network with both MarketAxess Holdings (extended in May to include an iShares exchange-traded-funds program) and Tradeweb Markets.

The 2014 Tech 50