The following is an extract from the 2026 Annual Chairman’s Letter to Investors  by Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock:

“Today, about one billion Indians effectively carry a bank branch in their pocket.²⁵ Through a digital wallet on their smartphones, they can pay, save, and transact digitally in rupees. While its main use today is payments, those same smartphones can become pathways into the capital markets. BlackRock’s joint venture with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group—JioBlackRock—is focused on exactly this: helping more Indians become investors. In less than a year, the venture has brought in more than a million investors across the country.

This is not just a story about a country catching up to the existing financial system. It’s a story about building modern financial infrastructure from the ground up.

It also offers a lesson for the next evolution in market infrastructure: tokenization—recording ownership on digital ledgers to reduce friction, lower costs, and speed settlement. India’s system is not built on blockchain-based infrastructure—in fact, it has largely taken a different path. But that’s precisely the point. Its success shows that new financial rails don’t depend on any single technology. They succeed when policy, technology, and adoption move together.

The economies that built modern finance—the United States, the U.K., the EU—are now working to modernize long-established systems so traditional and digital markets can operate side by side. When you’ve built the world’s deepest capital markets, change can come more gradually. But the objective should be the same: making it easier for people to invest in the growth of their country.

A smartphone wallet you can invest from is already remarkable. But the world of investable options grows much larger as financial assets themselves become digitally native. The bond you own is still a bond—but it can move more efficiently across modern infrastructure.

Over time, that could allow a single, regulated digital wallet to hold not just payment balances, but a broad range of financial assets. In a single wallet, someone could hold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), digital euros, tokenized bonds, and fractional interests in assets that were once out of reach—from infrastructure to private credit funds. By lowering minimum investment amounts and making it easier to divide assets into smaller pieces, tokenization can open the door to more investors. It could also make it simpler for investors to receive information and cast shareholder votes. The goal isn’t novelty. It’s giving savers a simpler, more seamless way to participate in markets and build wealth.

As Rob Goldstein and I wrote late last year, we believe that tokenization today may be roughly where the internet was in 1996. It won’t replace the existing financial system overnight. Instead, picture a bridge being built from both sides of a river, converging in the middle. On one side stand traditional institutions. On the other are digital-first innovators: stablecoin issuers, fintechs, public blockchains. The task for policymakers is to help build that bridge as quickly and safely as possible.

Consistency will be important. Rather than writing an entirely new rulebook for digital markets, we should update the one we have so traditional and tokenized markets can work together. Tokenization also needs guardrails like clear buyer protections to ensure tokenized products are safe and transparent, strong counterparty-risk standards to prevent shocks from spreading, and digital-identity verification to manage the risks associated with illicit finance. This way, people can trade and invest with the same confidence they have when swiping a card or wiring money.

ETFs

iShares remains a growth engine for the firm, delivering another record year in 2025 with $527 billion of net inflows. We’re seeing significant momentum across our premium growth categories, like active ETFs, digital assets, and international markets. We led global ETF flows in 2025, and our organic revenue was more than triple the next largest issuer’s. We’ve already had a strong start to 2026, with $103 billion in iShares net inflows through the end of February. Those flows are nearly double what they were at this point in 2025, which is great to see. But what’s even more inspiring is the global reach and diversification of activity across premium value categories.

Our $2.5 trillion active franchise continues to deliver meaningful alpha for clients and strong organic growth, even against a backdrop of industry outflows. Our fundamental fixed income platform generated over $45 billion of net inflows in 2025, continuing to outpace industry growth. We’re working across the spectrum of fixed income opportunities, from municipals to high yield, to total return and unconstrained. And in active equities, our systematic platform raised more than $50 billion in 2025, powered by the machine learning and big data capabilities we’ve been developing for more than two decades.

Private markets 

In private markets, we’re executing on an ambitious fundraising plan to raise a cumulative $400 billion by 2030. We have scaled platforms across two of the fastest-growing sectors in private markets—infrastructure and private credit. And we’re executing on a growing opportunity to bring the benefits of private markets investments to more investors, including insurance and wealth clients, and individuals saving for retirement.

In infrastructure, we closed GIP’s fifth flagship fund at $25.2 billion, representing the largest-ever client capital raise in a private infrastructure fund. And our AI Infrastructure Partnership is supporting the growth of artificial intelligence through investment in new and expanded AI infrastructure, including through its recent agreement to acquire Aligned Data Centers. In private credit, we saw nearly $20 billion of net inflows in 2025, primarily led by HPS’ flagship franchises. We have a strong fundraising and deployment roadmap ahead for 2026 and beyond.

2030 ambitions

Looking ahead to 2030, we aspire to deliver more than $35 billion in revenue, with 30% or more coming from private markets and technology. We expect the increase in revenue to be underpinned by our goals of 5% or greater organic base fee growth and low-to-mid-teens technology ACV growth. We’re aiming to nearly double adjusted operating income from 2024, alongside 45% or greater adjusted operating margins through the market cycle. We already have industry-leading margins, and we see opportunity to drive margin expansion through the fee-related earnings growth trajectory of private markets and our highly scaled foundational businesses. And all of these goals assume a flat market environment, with meaningful upside if markets are even modestly positive on the road to 2030.

BlackRock’s growth in 2025 was broad-based across capabilities that we’ve had for decades and others that we’ve built or acquired in the last two years. We expect a similar path to 2030, with growth coming from both our strong foundational pillars—like iShares and Aladdin—and franchises that we’re building in newer, high-growth markets across the industry. Private markets to insurance, private markets to wealth, digital assets, and active ETFs—we think these can all be $500 million revenue generators in the next five years.

We see a sizable opportunity to bring private markets to more investors, which can serve as a portfolio enhancer with diversification from the public markets, alongside long-term growth and income potential. Our investments in infrastructure, private credit, and alts-to-wealth ground our ambition to raise $400 billion in private markets by 2030. BlackRock already manages $3 trillion on behalf of insurance, wealth, and outsourcing clients. We have a significant opportunity to deliver better outcomes and experiences for clients in their private markets allocations.

For example, BlackRock is the largest insurance general account manager,⁴⁰ with $700 billion of assets. With HPS, we’re now also a scaled provider of asset-based finance and high-grade private debt offerings. We’re already seeing early momentum to bring high-grade private debt into portfolios that have historically invested with us in public markets.

And in wealth, we already have a strong presence, with over $30 billion in retail private markets AUM, alongside BlackRock’s global distribution platform and comprehensive advisor relationships. We’re now extending our private markets to wealth offering into a broader set of products and multi-alternatives models. We also recently launched a first-of-its-kind private markets SMA solution with Partners Group to enable greater retail access to private equity, private credit, and real assets. Delivered through a single subscription document, the strategies are designed to meet client objectives while minimizing operational complexity for advisors and their clients. These collective offerings are an important step to bring the benefits of private markets to more investors, including those saving for retirement or other financial goals.

BlackRock has long advocated for a broadening of retirement savings, whether through investment accounts seeded at birth or enabling more individuals to shift from savers to investors within the capital markets. More than half of our $14 trillion in AUM is linked to retirement, whether for an individual investor through an ETF or 401(k), or for pension clients investing on behalf of millions of schoolteachers, firefighters, and union workers around the world.⁴¹

We’re the largest defined contribution investment-only manager,⁴² which includes more than $600 billion across our LifePath target-date offering. Our LifePath Paycheck innovation pairs the flexibility of a target-date fund with a solution designed to give workers access to income streams they can rely on in retirement.

Many retirement plans around the world, including defined benefit plans, already include private markets allocations, bringing diversification, income, and the potential for greater alpha to individual constituents, not just institutions. But in the United States, the vast majority of retirement savers access the capital markets through a 401(k) offering, and don’t have access to private markets. We’re seeing significant momentum for a regulatory framework that could change that. We believe that private markets offer the potential to enhance retirement outcomes for participants when thoughtfully and responsibly incorporated into a professionally managed target date fund. Changes that bring private markets into 401(k) plans represent another opportunity for Preqin. Plan sponsors will need a wealth of data and standardized benchmarks, and Preqin is well-positioned to help provide this data and accelerate the transition.

Earlier this year, we unified Preqin’s data onto Aladdin. With Aladdin, eFront, and Preqin, we’ve created a public and private workflow and data solution housed within a single platform. I believe Aladdin will be a major beneficiary of AI, enabling clients to work with greater efficiency across ever-growing data sets and to unlock scale in their investment and analysis processes. AI can be a powerful business accelerator for Aladdin, amplifying the strengths of its scale, deep resources, proprietary data, and extensive embedded network across the global investment ecosystem.

BlackRock is also actively building in exciting newer technologies in financial markets, including digital assets and tokenized funds. Today, there’s very little access to traditional investment products in digital wallets. We plan to lead the charge in changing that.

BlackRock has already established early leadership in bringing institutional-quality products to the digital markets at scale, with nearly $150 billion in AUM connected to digital assets. Our tokenized treasury fund has grown into the largest tokenized fund in the world, and we manage $65 billion of stablecoin reserves, alongside nearly $80 billion of digital asset exchange-traded products (ETPs).⁴³ We’ve built all of these franchises in just the last few years, and we’re studying opportunities to grow our position even further.

Our digital assets ETPs are another example showing how our iShares ETF platform remains a powerful center for growth and innovation, generating double-digit organic asset and base fee growth in 2025. Even at more than $5 trillion in AUM, iShares is still unlocking new use cases for ETFs, bringing new investors into the capital markets and expanding our reach across regions.

In addition to digital assets, active ETFs represent an emerging growth channel for iShares. Our active ETF platform tripled in size in 2025, ending the year at nearly $100 billion in AUM with significant runway ahead. Our clients are increasingly embedding active ETFs into their portfolio strategy, including models, to unlock alpha, manage downside risk, or generate ongoing income. We’re bringing our active capabilities into the ETF market, broadening access to our portfolio managers and alpha opportunities to more investors around the world.

In Europe, we’re capitalizing on an expanding market, as a wave of first-time investors begins to enter the capital markets through monthly savings plans and digital-first offerings. 2025 iShares net inflows in Europe were 50% higher than 2024, capturing more than a third of flows in the region. We’re executing on a strong opportunity to build our business here, and across the world, as the ETF vehicle gains traction with individuals and institutions alike.”

Read the full letter here 

Source: BlackRock