BLK's Aladdin Ties Up With OTCX to Digitize OTC Derivative Trading

BlackRock Inc.’s BLK Aladdin platform has entered into a multi-year collaboration with OTCX, a leading regulated fintech, aiming to digitize dealer-to-client “voice” derivative trading and expand the option offerings for clients.

Rationale Behind BLK’s Partnership

This partnership seeks to address the industry’s long-standing dependence on manual, voice-based workflows in complicated derivatives. The BLK and OTCX collaboration will provide better choices for vanilla derivatives to clients for electronic trading.

This move will combine OTCX's execution venues into the Aladdin platform ecosystem, offering Aladdin clients a much more efficient, transparent and cheaper way to discover pricing, risk management and trade execution across a broad set of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. 

Through this integration, Aladdin clients will receive a comprehensive workflow support, including price discovery, request-for-market to execution and post-trade processing. The integration will provide connectivity across a comprehensive set of OTC derivatives.

With this partnership, BlackRock continues to diversify its revenue mix toward high-margin, recurring tech income, reinforcing Aladdin’s role as a core differentiator and long-term growth catalyst within the firm’s business model.

BlackRock has been engaged in growth efforts to boost its revenues through organic and inorganic means. Last month, it acquired ElmTree Funds to deepen its private market offerings. Further, it agreed to manage a roughly $80 billion customized portfolio offering to be launched by Citigroup C for its global wealth clients.

BlackRock’s Price Performance & Zacks Rank

Year to date, shares of BlackRock have gained 15% against the industry’s decline of 6%.

Currently, BLK carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Strategic Collaborations by Other Finance Firms

Last month, Citigroup and Dandelion, a subsidiary of Euronet Worldwide, Inc., collaborated to enhance cross-border payments by integrating Citigroup’s WorldLink Payment Services with Dandelion’s extensive digital wallet network.

This partnership will enable C’s clients to deliver near-instant, full-value payments into digital wallets across multiple markets. The capability will initially be extended to the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Colombia, with further expansion planned.

The collaboration empowers Citigroup’s institutional clients to make faster, cost-effective business-to-consumer payments across borders.

Similarly, Jed Finn, head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley MS, in an interview with Bloomberg, stated that the company has partnered with Zerohash, a cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, enabling E*TRADE clients to trade in popular cryptocurrencies starting in the first half of 2026.

Morgan Stanley will initially offer trading in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. Finn described the launch as “phase one,” adding that the company plans to develop a comprehensive wallet solution for clients as the next step.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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