Monday Nov 23, 2020 — We are excited to share that Aperio has gone back to its roots by entering into an agreement to be acquired by BlackRock, the current incarnation of the original pioneers who invented indexing and shook up the investing world forever in the early 1970s and then caused disruption again through iShares three decades later. [see press release]

To help provide continuity and maintain our high level of service, BlackRock has decided to keep the Aperio brand and all it represents. Their objective is to make Aperio the centerpiece of their offering to Ultra-High-Net-Worth (UHNW) clients, reflecting our capabilities around the unique challenges and complexities of those investors.

Over the past 21 years, Aperio has made its mission to transform wealth management by elevating index investing through hyper-customization, tax optimization and values-aligned investing (ESG/SRI). Today, thanks to you and all our clients, Aperio is among the most trusted solution providers to UHNW and sophisticated institutional investors.

We are proud of the small ways we might have changed an industry so often focused on its own benefit rather than for the benefit of investors. We look forward to continuing to fight the good fight from a much bigger platform.

We’ve had extensive conversations with our new partners at BlackRock, and they share our mission to keep Aperio’s ethos and those values of transparency, commitment and accountability that have cemented two decades of client partnerships and earned us the trust we hope to be able to continue to engender.    

In that framework, our discussions with BlackRock convinced us that we share a common client-centric vision and commitment to research integrity that focus first on what’s best for investors. We believe that the partnership with BlackRock will help us innovate with new advanced solutions for wealth advisors and their clients. We have also been impressed by their approach to ESG issues and their assurance that we can continue to provide our clients with the industry’s best screening, proxy voting and shareholder engagement.  We look forward to having more influence on governance and ESG issues as part of the predominant asset manager in the world.

In terms of organization, Aperio will become part of BlackRock’s US Wealth Advisory division. Liz Michaels and Ran Leshem will become co-heads of the Aperio business unit, a succession already announced this past summer. Patrick Geddes, current CEO, will remain at Aperio, and after a transition period of a few months, will join the BlackRock Investment Institute as Senior Tax Strategist.