Associate, Business Strategy

**Description**

**About this role**

**Business Unit Overview**

BlackRock’s ETF and Index Investments (EII) business is the leading index investment engine. We help investors build better portfolios with the industry’s leading suite of index investment tools. We enable investors to replace individual securities, to take short-term market views, to invest cash rapidly, to execute more efficiently than swaps, futures or individual bonds, to take long-term core positions and to construct efficient portfolios. We are the best in the world at building and managing efficient index tools for our clients. We serve every kind of investor: pensions, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, asset managers, wealth advisors and individual investors.

**Team context**

Business Strategy sits at the heart of strategic decision-making within EII EMEA. Partnering with other teams across the broader EII organisation - including Product, iSW Sales, and Global Markets - Business Strategy helps to solve some of EII’s biggest business challenges. The team is relied upon by EII leadership in EMEA and globally as well as the broader organisation to run projects, digest complex information and communicate it in a straightforward and action-oriented manner.

With an emphasis on fact-based decision making and challenging the status quo where it pushes the business forward, our team partners with the EII EMEA Executive Committee to chart both the long-term direction and short-medium term priorities for the business. The team offers an excellent platform to learn about elements of our business, build and enhance transferrable skills across the strategy toolkit, and gain significant exposure to leadership. Business Strategy is split across 3 pillars: (1) Client strategy is focused on understanding client needs and delivering on initiatives to drive index penetration (2) Product strategy supports development and delivery of our Index range to ensure we maintain a world-class index offering (3) Business Intelligence is responsible for understanding iShares, industry, and competitor performance including drivers of growth and developing recommendations to accelerate growth.

**Job Purpose/Background**

The Associate will play a critical role within the **Product Strategy** pillar of the team and will be central to delivering impactful strategy projects and contributing to the success of our product businesses. Associates typically own workstreams within broader projects, and work in cross-functional teams to deliver a successful outcome. Associates enjoy a high degree of freedom in their work, and are challenged to roll up their sleeves, immerse themselves in a topic, demonstrate curiosity to understand the finer details and provoke thinking of others, and ultimately provide elegant solutions to complex problems.

The role demands analytical and logical abilities to deconstruct complex business problems into components and conduct analyses and interviews to derive a solution. This individual will partner with stakeholders and work across index wrappers (ETFs, Index Mutual Funds and Mandates) to regularly analyse our range, solve business problems, provide updates to senior leadership, and explore areas for future growth.

**Key Responsibilities**

Under the direction of senior team members, deliver strategy projects on priority topics for the business:

- Develop working knowledge of our 6 key product segments across ETFs (Fixed Income, Core Equities, Precision Equities, Factors, Thematics and Sustainable), plus index mutual funds and mandates
- Understand drivers of performance and growth across product ranges, clients and geographies and actively seek creative growth opportunities to explore for product segments
- Structure work streams, define approach, identify stakeholders, conduct research / interviews
- Generate hypotheses on business problems, and identify the information required to validate them
- Navigate datasets; gather and synthesize information from multiple external sources (such as industry research, financial publications, field sales, events etc ) and conduct fact-based analyses to draw conclusions and actionable insights
- Engage senior team members in problem solving sessions and on potential issues along the way
- Create impactful reports/presentations to communicate with BlackRock and iShares management on project progress and conclusions; produce top-quality presentation decks for internal and external presentations
- Build regional and global connectivity with EII product and strategy teams and collaborate with other product teams across BlackRock (e.g. Fundamental Active Equities, Wealth Product Group, Global Product Group, Virtual Fixed Income, Global Fixed Income etc.)
- Show interest/engagement in topics beyond current project priorities: provide insights and views to other projects and become sounding board for team members

**Experience/Skills**
- Strong understanding of the Asset Management i