National Employment Savings Trust, London, will use BlackRock's Aladdin to manage investment risk across its entire portfolio, the organizations said in a release Oct. 30.
The master trust manages more than £33 billion ($39.9 billion) in assets, making it the U.K.'s largest workplace pension scheme. Before turning to Aladdin, NEST for the past six years used Bloomberg's PORT as its main tool for monitoring and analyzing risk, "but our requirements have now grown," a spokesman said in an email.
The two components of the Aladdin platform — the Whole Portfolio View and Aladdin Climate — will monitor more than 3,000 risk factors across fixed income, equity, foreign exchange and private markets, and quantify the financial impact of climate-related risks.
With more illiquid assets and more complicated public market investment strategies at NEST, Aladdin allows a holistic view on risk profiles of its multiasset portfolios, and fully integrates ESG factors in the risk management process, said Jiwei Dong, head of market risk and asset allocation for NEST, in the release. "It's crucial we upgrade our services in line with our projected growth to be a £100 billion scheme by the end of the decade," Dong said.