Larry Fink
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at BlackRock
I can't say I feel any older. I can't complain at all. It's been a fun journey, and I think the journey going forward is going to be better. There's a lot of change in the world in the last 25 years, and there's [Phonetic] a lot that stays the same. My meal the night before earnings remains the same. I had a bowl of cereal last night with blueberries. So, I guess, everything is the same, but thank you, Martin. And also, Happy New Year to everybody, and thank you for joining the call. And yes, it is our 100th.
We haven't done it alone. We have a number of shareholders that have been with us since the IPO 25 years ago. I remember that original road show when we tried to convince many of our shareholders, who remain today, about the opportunities to invest in BlackRock. And we're also grateful for the analyst community in helping the markets understand our business. I think, two of our equity analysts on the line were with us for the IPO. So I want to thank -- thanks to Bill Katz and Brian Bedell for your coverage over all these years. And the best is still in front of us.
When we IPO-ed, we were a company of 650 employees and we managed $165 billion in assets. That same year, we began selling our Aladdin technology to our clients for the first time. Today, clients trust us with nearly $11.6 trillion of AUM, and Aladdin has more than 130,000 users. Since our IPO, we've delivered an annualized total return for our shareholders of about 21% compared to about 8% for the S&P 500. And as I said, this is just the beginning.
As Martin said, 2024 was a milestone year for BlackRock. Clients entrusted us with a record $641 billion of net inflows, including $281 billion in the fourth quarter. We now had two consecutive record flow quarters. We entered 2025 at our strongest inflection point. We added $1.5 trillion of AUM, delivered record revenues and record operating income, and increased our effective fee rate by 5%.
Historic client activity took place, as we executed on the most significant acquisitions we've done since BGI over 15 years ago. It's not uncommon for companies to see clients pausing, as they wait out the M&A results, as they determine and -- determine whether BlackRock is focusing on their needs. At BlackRock, clients are instead embracing and rewarding our strategy. Clients activity accelerated into the fourth quarter, resulting in a 7% organic base fee growth and 12% technology services ACV growth.
Our operating model delivered exceptional performance in a year of meaningful change. We crossed the $20 billion of annual revenues, up 14% from our 2023. Adjusted operating income grew by 23%. And our industry margins of 44.5% was up 280 basis points. We always raise the bar for ourselves and know our clients and shareholders do the same. Our results consistently beat even our high expectations, and we surpassed Street estimates for flows, fee rate, base rate, in addition to total revenues, margins and EPS.
Our record organic growth and financial results do not yet reflect the full integration or pending acquisitions of GIP, HPS and Preqin. All three of these businesses have a track record of delivering strong revenue growth, profitability and margin expansion. And we're steadily making organic investments ahead of our -- the structural trends that we believe will drive outsized growth in the years ahead.
We've had strong momentum across our entire franchise, including our newly-enhanced private market platform. We positioned ahead of market opportunities that we believe will drive outsized growth for BlackRock in the years to come. We invested in our talent, which is fundamentally the most important thing that we invest in each and every year.
Our key driver of BlackRock's success has been our focus on developing leaders with a broad range of experiences and connectivity across all of BlackRock, what I've called horizontal leadership. We look to identify people ready for the next challenge and then move them into roles that both advance their professional journeys and drive our business forward. Today, we are excited to announce that many leaders across the firm are taking on new and expanded roles and responsibilities that will help drive our next phase of growth.
Part of the leadership changes reflect on Mark Wiedman's desire to pursue his next chapter after nearly 20 years with BlackRock. We've discussed his transition over a number of months, and he will be with us through spring, and I want to take a moment to recognize and thank Mark. Mark is a great friend of mine, a great friend of the firms, and has helped drive strong growth for BlackRock, for our clients and for our shareholders. He has also built a powerful team of leaders prepared to take on new responsibilities and drive our business forward. This includes a number of the senior leaders taking on expanded roles. Mark will work with our leadership team over the next few months to ensure a smooth transition. We thank him for his many contributions, his partnership and his vision in shaping the successful evolution of BlackRock.
Rob and I are proud of the deep leadership team at BlackRock. It reflects a breadth of experience and sustained excellence. Strategic acquisitions have also historically strengthened our firm, strengthened our culture, and bringing top talent, new skills and experience into our organization. Our culture has consistently evolved as we welcome new teams and colleagues to BlackRock. And today, it represents a blending of the best parts of the cultures that have come together across the years, across all the firms that became part of BlackRock.
A few months ago, we welcomed the influx of talent with the close of GIP. We've already enjoyed great connectivity, and our teams are energized. BlackRock's world-class leadership, alongside the top talent from GIP, from HPS and Preqin, position us to serve our clients with excellence and seizing the opportunities ahead for us. In my conversations with clients around the world, they're eager to put capital to work, and they want to do it through BlackRock. Public markets entered the year from a position of strength. Clients holding cash on the sidelines missed out on a 25% total return in equities last year.
We expect 2025 to be a dynamic investing environment. As policies and economic questions play out, the most important factor will be the growth backdrop. Mega forces like AI and ongoing evolution in the debt financing and the low-carbon transition are transforming economies with long-term growth trajectories. Capital markets will play a key role in this transformation. Private market assets are an increasingly vital part of capital markets, and blending both public and private markets will be critical to fully capturing growth opportunities.
Long-held investing principles need to evolve, including the traditional 60-40 portfolio mix of stock and bonds. The diversifying nature of the stock and bond relationship is under increasingly strong pressure, making resilient portfolio construction more critical than ever. Clients are coming to BlackRock for advice on how to build portfolios, how to broaden out where they invest. For many, they will increasingly include private markets, especially private credit and infrastructure. We also think active strategies can provide an advantage in an environment that requires a more dynamic approach. BlackRock is well positioned to capitalize on structural growth opportunities against the backdrop of economic and capital market evolution. We've made coordinated investments to build the premier long-term capital partner and technology provider across public and private markets.
2025 is a new launch point for significant growth for BlackRock, our clients and our shareholders. Our recent acquisition of GIP, the planned acquisitions of Preqin and HPS, each position our platform ahead of evolving our client needs and structural industry trends. 15 years ago, we acquired BGI, and we're the first scale provider to integrate both active and index investments.
In 2024, we made bold moves to connect public and private markets through portfolio management and technology. The reaction to our recent announcement to acquire HPS has been extremely positive, and we see great opportunities to partner more closely with clients and borrowers. The capabilities we're adding through these transactions allow us to serve clients even more comprehensively and position us to raise significant private capital. For our shareholders, we believe the increased contribution from private markets and technology will drive higher and more resilient organic growth, differentiating financial performance and multiple re-rating.
In addition to private markets, we are executing on the strongest opportunity set we've seen across multiple growth engines. These include technology, ETFs, multi-asset solutions like outsourcing and models. We invested for years to develop leading franchises and capabilities that our clients need most and that are our long-term growth channels. Importantly, they're scaled and integrated onto one platform with a culture that is client-led, not product-led. We're able to serve our clients in a way that no other asset manager can.
Aladdin has always been the operating system uniting all of BlackRock. It's grown and evolved as BlackRock has. It's the industry's most comprehensive operating system, supporting scale and commercial priorities for clients. We're growing our capability set in Aladdin, all with the aim of serving our clients through sophisticated risk management, scaled portfolio analytics across both public and private markets, and soon private market data through Preqin.
Fourth quarter ACV growth of 12% reflects several significant mandates with large financial and corporate partners. The Aladdin technology stack is resonating with over half the Aladdin sales, involving multiple products. This includes clients using Aladdin's whole portfolio view, which grew out of our acquisition of eFront to seamlessly manage portfolios across public and private asset classes on one platform. It includes clients leveraging Enterprise Aladdin, alongside Aladdin Accounting or the Aladdin Data Cloud.
Technology is at the foundation of BlackRock. ETFs are another example. We view ETFs as a technology that facilitates investments. Since our acquisition of iShares, BlackRock has led in expanding the market for ETFs by making them more accessible and by delivering new asset classes like bonds or crypto and investment strategies like active. Approximately a quarter of the $390 billion of ETF net inflows were into products launched in the last five years.
Our active ETFs delivered $22 billion of net inflows in 2024, while our Bitcoin ETP was the largest ETF launch in history, growing to over $50 billion of AUM in less than a year, and it was the third highest asset-gathering ETF in the entire ETF industry behind only the S&P 500 index funds. We're innovating at the product and portfolio level and accelerating our distribution capabilities to deliver a differentiated investment solution.
In Europe, we scaled our ETF offering significantly, and the market is still much more nascent than it is in the US. We have seen double-digit organic growth in each of the last two years, including over $90 billion in growth in net inflows in 2024. Our European ETF platform is nearing $1 trillion of assets, which is larger than the next five issuers combined. Much of this growth is powered by individual investors, as online banking platforms, digital-first offerings and ETF saving plans are enabling more first-time investors to invest in their savings to start and beginning their retirement savings and to build a better and more robust future for themselves. From first-time individual investors to the most sophisticated institutions, ETFs are connecting investors to the growth of the capital markets around the world.
Client's needs are driving industry consolidation, and investors increasingly prefer to work with BlackRock as a scaled multi-asset provider. We see this in the wealth channels, where managed model portfolios are the main way in which wealth managers are looking to scale their practices and better serve their clients. BlackRock has a leading models business, backed by our multi-asset, multi-product capabilities across both ETFs and active strategies. We see this in our relationship with the largest asset owners, our pension funds and corporate, as these clients seek to deepen their ties with BlackRock. Many of these corporate partners see positive network effects to their core business and to their own shareholders by extending their relationship with BlackRock. This year, our clients entrusted us with more than $120 billion of scaled outsourcing mandates. Many of these outsourced portfolios are from pension plans and retirement schemes that we're investing on behalf of millions of workers to help them save for their future.
Our LifePath target-date franchise now manages more than $0.5 trillion of assets, and we're extending our work in this important area to help more and more people save for retirement. In 2024, we launched our LifePath Paycheck offering, which pairs a traditional 401(k) plan with the option to purchase an annuity-based income stream as a worker approaches retirement. The solution is the fastest-growing lifetime income target-date strategy in the defined contribution market with $16 billion invested at year-end. We also adopted LifePath Paycheck as part of our US retirement saving plan for employees here at BlackRock. We think this will become the default defined contribution offering for the entire industry, and we're exploring opportunities to expand LifePath Paycheck to more partners and workers throughout the world.
We have built our platform around a core strategy of connecting investors to the long-term growth of the capital markets. In my conversation with clients and governance [Phonetic] leaders around the world, there has been great focus on the strong capital markets we have in the United States. Countries want to further develop their own robust capital markets, and this drives investment in their own local economies, which in turn provides opportunity for job growth, wealth creation for their own citizens.
Over the last few years, BlackRock has partnered with governments and sovereign wealth funds to help deepen their local capital markets. We see tremendous opportunities in India, where digital infrastructure efforts are facilitating widespread access to digital payments and financial products. Our joint venture, Jio BlackRock, is expected to launch later this year, subject to regulatory approvals. We're combining our investment expertise with the local market knowledge of our partner, Jio Financial Services, to launch digital-first assets with wealth management businesses.
In Saudi Arabia, we're launching an investment management platform to partner with a public investment fund to drive investments and future growth in the local economy. And we're investing and layering the foundation today for opportunities that we believe will result in significant AUM over the next five to 10 years.
We've had great success with our large asset owners and collaborations already, including: our joint venture, Decarbonization Partners, with Temasek; our recent AI partnership with Microsoft and MGX, which aims to mobilize data centers and infrastructure investments. These global partnerships are only available to BlackRock because of the deep relationships we built over many years with local partners, heads of states and sophisticated asset owners.
I have spent a lot of time on the road last year, as has Rob and other members of our leadership team. Adebayo [Phonetic] and I have also traveled to see clients together in recent months. We're spending time with our institutional clients, our wealth clients and increasingly with our largest asset owners in the world. Clients, corporates and sovereigns are looking to assemble deeply intertwined partnerships, not just the set it and forget it investments that yield a good return. BlackRock is in a class of its own in being able to partner with clients comprehensively and in an integrated scaled way. We can build with clients across their entire portfolio and across the investment life cycle from ETFs to high performing active and private markets, to technology and data through Aladdin, eFront, and eventually, Preqin.
The strength of our platform and the commitment of our employees in serving our clients powered record results for our shareholders in 2024. And that was before significant growth unlocked from our strategic acquisitions and organic investments in high-growth markets around the world. 2024 was just the beginning. BlackRock enters 2025 with more growth and upside potential than ever.
Operator, let's open it up for questions.
