
Endowments and foundations
How we serve endowments and foundations
We understand results stem from more than just investment strategies. Our client engagement model focuses on understanding our clients business goals and supporting their growth by addressing both investment and operational needs. Transparency and knowledge transfer are at the heart of our approach.
Our offerings include:
• OCIO services and whole portfolio strategies that help endowments and foundations address their long-term objectives
• Cutting-edge investment solutions across active, index and alternatives
• Innovative risk management powered by our Aladdin® platform
• Portfolio analysis and insights from our in-house Client Insight Unit (CIU)
• Liquidity optimization analysis to assess and seek to optimize risk and return
• Private equity diagnostics, leveraging our proprietary tools and models to assist with portfolio planning to mitigate J-curve risk, while seeking incremental alpha in a cost-efficient manner
• Bespoke hedge fund performance-based risk analyses at the total portfolio and individual manager level, providing insights on key drivers of risk and return, as well as scenario analyses and portfolio optimization
• Events, workshops and peer forums to collaborate, share best practices and exchange perspectives
• Thought leadership that leverages the firm's deep expertise
Meeting the challenge of the new regime in endowment portfolios

Our investment platform
BlackRock provides an extensive suite of investment strategies across public and private markets. Our dedicated endowments and foundations team creates a tailored client experience built to address each client's unique objectives.
Diversified alternatives
BlackRock’s alternatives platform offers endowments and foundations attractive, differentiated strategies that seek to enhance returns, reduce the broader market volatility impact and drive long-term growth across market cycles. Our alternatives platform is designed to deliver endowments and foundations a range of investment options across hedge funds, private equity, private credit and real assets including infrastructure and transition finance investing.
At BlackRock, we believe that the need for an approach to alternative investing that is scalable, disciplined, integrated, technology-enabled and transparent has never been greater. BlackRock's alternatives platform seeks to deliver endowments and foundations enhanced returns across a range of investments such as private credit, private equity and infrastructure.
Why BlackRock for OCIO
With rates at historic lows, it's hard for traditional fixed income investments to earn the income you need. In this video I'll walk through 3 ways to analyze your portfolio to help improve yield with similar risk
Hi and welcome to Quick Insights. I'm Calvin Yu, head of the Client Insight Unit at BlackRock. In this series, we talk about common challenges investors face and insights to help achieve the desired outcome.
So how can we pick up more yield with the same risk?
We've been getting this question a lot, and recently a client asked for ideas to help meet their income needs.
This client had a few objectives:
Achieve income to meet cash disbursements with low-moderate risk.
In this case, a big drawdown could severely impact the client's operations.
Maintain liquidity to support payments
Invest primarily in fixed income, but had flexibility to invest in alternatives and equities as well
We'll walk through this specific case study, but what's interesting is we can use the same framework to analyze different objectives as well
The first thing was looking at the yields and risks of different fixed income sectors. We also look at efficiencies from a yield per unit of risk perspective. You can see areas like securitized and high yield look more efficient than core FI. In this situation, the client was mostly invested in core fixed income. We proposed breaking out this allocation and diversifying across a broader set of sectors, which improved the yield by almost 100 bps, while risk increased moderately. It led to a more efficient outcome and the yield per unit of risk improved from 0.58 to 0.77.
Now the fixed income and credit markets are very dynamic. If you rank the performance of the sectors each year, the rankings are constantly changing. HY was the best sector in 2016, but it was also the worst the year before. The dispersion can be very high.
The ability to leverage our market expertise, analytics, and platform to navigate the dynamic landscape was important to this client.
The second thing we look at is how the new fixed income portfolio impacted the total portfolio's returns and risks. So here, we illustrated different reallocations across fixed income, equities and alternatives. And as we reallocated to more risky assets, the returns improved, but risk increased, forming a frontier. The interesting thing is the new portfolios were more efficient, and had better returns per unit of risk compared to the current portfolio.
The devil's always in the details, particularly when it comes to risk.
It's important to look at the drivers of risk and how the portfolio would do in downside scenarios. And so the third thing we look at was how these portfolios may perform under stress scenarios. We outlined some scenarios here, we can customize other scenarios that you may be focused on as well. In the end, we partnered closely with this client; they implemented one of these portfolios, and were able to better meet their income needs with similar levels of risk.
So if you want to learn more different ways to help improve yield in your portfolio, reach out to your BlackRock relationship manager.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you with the next Insight
Dedicated portfolio analysis for endowments & foundations
BlackRock’s Client Insight Unit (CIU) can help endowments & foundations develop solutions reflective of their core investment philosophy.
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Our endowments and foundations team
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Commons questions
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BlackRock is a fiduciary to endowments and foundations clients. Our team offers institutionally-scaled investment services that range from single mandates to multi-asset solutions, tailored portfolio analytics leveraging Aladdin® technology and market insights provided through research reports and investment forums. The Client Insight Unit (CIU) provides endowments and foundations with multi-asset portfolio construction expertise, focusing on solutions comprising both public and private markets.
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Yes, the BlackRock Educational Academy was launched in 2013 with the objective of facilitating the training needs of BlackRock’s institutional clients. Learn more about the BlackRock Educational Academy.
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We offer a variety of events – including calls, workshops, forums and conferences – that allow endowments and foundations to engage in debate around topical issues and to make better informed investment decisions.
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We believe BlackRock’s scale is its key competitive advantage - it allows access to a plethora of information and insights that enable innovative risk management. Our Aladdin® platform combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive portfolio management, trading and operations tools to power informed decision-making and effective risk management.
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We have an extensive, US$326B alternatives platform (as of December 2022) that seeks to deliver outperformance with close collaboration. We offer clients access to high-quality opportunities across real estate, infrastructure, private equity, credit, hedge funds and multi-alternative solutions. Our global reach across private and public markets powers our sourcing, and industry-leading technology seeks to deliver improved transparency on investments.