Vestmark announced a partnership with BlackRock meant to combine advanced portfolio management with tax management capabilities.
Specifically, the partnership will combine Vestmark’s VAST tax management capabilities across equities, ETFs and separately managed accounts with BlackRock’s capacity for building model portfolios at scale.
VAST, which is not an acronym, is an outsourced portfolio management service focused on personalization at scale that was rolled out in early 2023. It can be thought of as a personalized unified managed account, one that can include a direct indexing sleeve, separately managed accounts, mutual funds, ETFs and individual securities. Vestmark has an active tax overlay equipped with daily tax optimization capability at the account level.
Through the partnership with BlackRock, which now manages more than $10.6 trillion in assets, advisors will be able to access a range of both standard and advisor-customizable model portfolios that are all managed and rebalanced through Vestmark’s Manager Marketplace, which hosts more than 1,200 model strategies at present.
At the heart of the combined offering is Vestmark's unified managed account platform, which integrates the implementation of mutual funds, ETFs, equity separately managed accounts, fixed-income SMAs, and alternatives, all within a single custodian account.
According to Vestmark, more than 65,000 advisors from various firms manage $1.5 trillion in assets through its platform.
“Collaborating with Vestmark allows us to continue expanding our choice to RIAs who want our portfolio design solutions,” wrote Eve Cout, head of Portfolio Design & Solutions within BlackRock’s U.S. Wealth Advisory business, in the statement.
Vestmark is not the only firm the world’s largest asset manager has partnered with or invested in recently.
Earlier this month, BlackRock announced a partnership with Partners Group to launch a multi-private markets model portfolio in 2025. The joint offering will include private equity, private credit and real assets in a single portfolio and will be managed by both firms.
Blackrock (along with Fidelity, Franklin Templeton and State Street Global Advisors) partnered with Envestnet to provide RIA clients with access to fund strategist portfolios comprised of ETFs and mutual funds managed by those asset managers on the latter’s platform. First announced in June, RIAs are supposed to have access to those managed portfolios via Envestnet’s RIA Marketplace starting October 1.
In July, Chicago-based turnkey asset management platform GeoWealth announced it had raised $18 million in growth investment funding, with BlackRock as a new lead investor.
