BlackRock manages money for other people. Its clients range from pension plans, charities, central banks and insurers to individual savers, who mostly reach it through brokers, banks and financial advisers. It invests their money in stocks, bonds, cash, private assets such as infrastructure and private loans, and commodities, through mutual funds, its iShares exchange-traded funds (funds that trade on a stock exchange) and accounts run for single clients. At the end of 2025 it managed $14.0 trillion of client assets.
Most of its revenue comes from fees charged as a share of the assets it manages, plus fees for beating agreed benchmarks on some funds and income from lending out securities. Exchange-traded funds made up 42% of its long-term assets. It also sells software and data, chiefly Aladdin, a system that investment firms use to manage portfolios and risk; this brought in $2.0 billion in 2025. BlackRock says it competes with other fund managers, insurers, banks, brokers and financial technology firms.
BlackRock has about 24,900 employees in more than 30 countries, and says about 60% of them work outside the United States. In July 2025 it bought HPS Investment Partners, a private credit manager, adding to its earlier purchases of the infrastructure investor GIP and the data provider Preqin.