MutualFundWire.com: Morrison Adds to a $10B-AUM Suite From the Gotham Giant

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Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Morrison Adds to a $10B-AUM Suite From the Gotham Giant

The folks at the publicly traded Gotham Giant are expanding their $4.7-trillion-AUM, 1,600-plus-fund* ETF unit's $10-billion-AUM** infrastructure ETF suite.

Last Thursday (July 31), Balfe Morrison, head of listed infrastructure strategies for the global real asset securities group at BlackRock [profile], unveiled the launch of the iShares Infrastructure Active ETF (BILT on the Cboe BZX). The New York City-based asset manager's San Francisco-based BlackRock Fund Advisors (BFA) arm serves as the new fund's investment advisor, while BlackRock International Limited and BlackRock (Singapore) Limited serve as subadvisors.

BILT comes with an expense ratio of 60 basis points, and the new ETF's inception date was July 29 (i.e. last Tuesday, one week ago today). BILT now has $11.232 million in AUM***.

Morrison serves as BILT's sole portfolio manager. Yet the BlackRock team notes that the global real assets securities team (of which Morrison is a member) also manages the new fund.

Morrison puts the launch of BILT in the context of what he describes as the continuing expansion and acceleration of "physical and digital infrastructure opportunities" in light of "structural shifts" in the world's economy.

"Investors may be under-allocated to listed infrastructure today – partly because there is no formal sector classification for infrastructure, and the companies within the universe have represented only a small percentage of global equity indices," Morrison states. "BILT aims to offer investors an actively managed approach to tapping into the multi-decade growth potential of infrastructure, an asset class with lower volatility than global equity markets, in the convenience and transparency of an ETF."

BILT is an actively managed, non-diversified series of BlackRock ETF Trust. The new ETF's other service providers include:

BlackRock Institutional Trust Company, N.A. (BTC) as securities lending agent;

BlackRock Investments, LLC (BRIL) as distributor;

Citibank, N.A. as a BRIL subcontractor for "certain ETF services";

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as independent accounting firm;

Sidley Austin LLP as counsel; and

State Street Bank and Trust Company as administrator, custodian, dividend disbursing agent, and transfer agent.