BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The last few decades have been marked by a number of megatrends in finance including the extraordinary growth of asset managers, the rising importance of technology, and the ascent of private markets. BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, is emblematic of all these developments. On this episode, we talk to BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein about the company's early technological history, the development of its famous risk management technology Aladdin, and how BlackRock is navigating being both a user and major provider of AI. We discuss his view of the 'SaaSpocalypse,' how BlackRock is thinking about token consumption and compute constraint, as well as the future of private markets.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for listening to All Thoughts. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, All Thoughts on Amazon Music. |
| 0:12.8 | Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. |
| 0:30.8 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. |
| 0:31.9 | I'm Tracy Alloway. |
| 0:33.3 | And I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 0:36.4 | Joe, when I think about the world of finance. |
| 0:36.8 | Yeah. |
| 0:55.8 | And what I would describe as mega trends of recent years and decades, there are definitely two that spring to mind, maybe a third trend, although I don't know if it's mega, probably is. The first is definitely the rise of the buy side. So this idea that, you know, it very much used to be all about the banks and those were the ones that we kind of obsessed over. |
| 0:59.7 | And then you had this extraordinary growth in the asset management industry. |
| 1:03.5 | The second megatrend has to be technology, right? |
| 1:09.7 | Think about the rise of electronic trading, electronic risk management, model-driven risk management. |
| 1:10.5 | I like this. |
| 1:28.1 | And then the third semi-megatrend, I don't know, rise of private markets, right? Yeah. Oh, I have another one that I think is legit. The sort of power law domination of a few mega companies and sort of whether it's the big get bigger. The winner take allness or the winner take mostness of the industry. |
| 1:29.6 | I would add that as a megatrans. |
| 1:30.3 | Okay, that's great. And I would say that connects to this episode. |
| 1:31.5 | Absolutely. |
| 1:32.1 | So we have four big slash megatrends and we have the perfect guest to talk about all of those four things. |
| 1:40.3 | And it comes at a time when obviously we're in this new sort of technological wave with AI. |
| 1:45.0 | It very much feels like everyone in professional finance wants to figure out a way of being involved in AI in one way or another. |
| 1:53.0 | It's funny, I was meeting up with someone who works at a very large bank the other day, and they were talking about how work that they've done 20 years ago, their managers are now adamant. |
| 2:01.6 | It has to be put into a big Excel database because they're about to shove all of that into an |
| 2:05.9 | AI model. So you can see there's this like urgency. And there's a perennial question over how much |
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