Robinhood at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Innovations and Global Ambitions

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Robinhood Markets Inc (NASDAQ:HOOD) outlined its strategic vision to become a leading global financial ecosystem. The company, known for its technology-driven approach, is focusing on innovation and international expansion. However, challenges remain as it navigates regulatory landscapes and competition.

Key Takeaways

• Robinhood aims to expand its presence internationally, focusing on markets in the UK, Singapore, and Canada.
• The company is enhancing its offerings for active traders, with a goal to lead in equity and options trading.
• Robinhood’s retirement account assets have reached $17 billion, showcasing significant growth.
• Innovative solutions like prediction markets and tokenization are being explored to broaden investment opportunities.
• Robinhood is implementing a wealth transfer strategy to connect financial advisors with new generations of investors.

Financial Results

• Market capitalization has more than doubled over the past year.
• Retirement account assets have grown significantly, reaching $17 billion.

Operational Updates

• Robinhood is focused on becoming a leader in both equity and options trading, competing closely with major rivals.
• The company has seen a positive shift in ACAT transfers, gaining accounts from competitors like Interactive Brokers.
• The introduction of Robinhood Legend, a web-based platform, caters to active traders migrating from other platforms.
• International expansion efforts are underway, with a presence in the UK and plans to secure licenses in Singapore and Canada.

Future Outlook

• Robinhood plans aggressive global expansion, leveraging its technology to reach new markets.
• The company is exploring tokenization to provide global access to investments, removing traditional borders.
• Prediction markets are expected to evolve with regulatory clarity, offering new derivatives and growth opportunities.
• Robinhood aims to address wealth transfer challenges by connecting financial advisors with future wealth recipients.

Q&A Highlights

• The ethics of prediction markets were discussed, with Robinhood acknowledging sports as an asset class while debating its limits.
• International expansion via tokenization was explored, with the potential use of tokenized stocks on platforms like Bitstamp.
• The wealth transfer strategy involves a referral program to connect advisors with the next generation of investors on the Robinhood platform.

For a more detailed analysis, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Hi. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us this year at JPMorgan’s TMC Conference and this morning’s chat with Steve Quirk, the chief brokerage officer at Robinhood. Now, Robinhood is a $51,000,000,000 firm that offers retail investors access to stock derivative and crypto trading as well as services including it’s getting to be a longer list.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Retirement, lending, credit cards, portfolio management, and soon personal banking. So Steve has served as the chief brokerage officer for Robinhood since early two thousand and twenty two. Previously, he oversaw strategy and development of initiatives for trading at TD Ameritrade and think and think or swim. Steve has a ton of industry experience. We really appreciate you coming back to TMC here with us today.

So I’ll kick off sort of framing Robinhood’s participation here. So we’re at a tech conference. Robinhood has ambitions to build the number one global financial ecosystem. And I wanted to frame Robinhood’s corporate identity to potentially new investors here in the audience today. So maybe start by talking about Robinhood as a tech versus a financial or Fintech firm.

How do you think about the positioning of the company?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Before I get started, want to give you and the team credit because last year when I was here, we were talking about this before we came on. We like to think this was a catalyst for us. We announced a couple of things. We announced lower margin rates, industry leading margin rates, and we’ve doubled our margin book. We had a retirement product, and we’ve more than doubled that.

We’d probably 10x ed it. And we’ve doubled our market cap. So I was I was giving him credit and saying, you know, this was a catalyst for for a lot of the positive changes, jokingly, this morning.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: And a JPMorgan upgrade, I think, out of it too.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: And a JPMorgan upgrade. Yes. And we’re hoping for another one of those today. You can all participate as well. But to to your question, to answer your question, yeah, my background is mainly, on the financial services side.

But I I started my career, you know, on the other side. So I was basically downstream. I was a market maker, and I worked for market makers. So I had a decent understanding of the technologies behind trading, and then I sort of worked my way up. One of the first retail brokerage firms I worked for, Thinkorswim, I would call us more of a fintech.

We were small, but we grew very quickly, and we were on the cutting edge of technology. So I learned a lot there. And then we were acquired multiple times, finally by TD Ameritrade, then by Schwab. So I worked for all those firms. And it’s just a it provides a great vantage point because I got to see the customer bases of all these different brokerage firms and understand, you know, what their needs were from a customer standpoint.

And so when I got to Robinhood, you know, again, it was like Benjamin Buttons. You know, I I reset back to, you know, people that were closer to my kid’s age, and and just had an opportunity to sort of lay out what we needed to do to grow with these customers the same way, you know, the Fidelity’s, the ETRADE’s, the Schwab’s, the TD Ameritrade’s grew with their customer bases when they first, got those customers because they were quite similar in age, if you think about it. So that’s really the quest we’ve been on is to just deliver on that. And with respect to coming to a, what I’ll call, a real strong fintech, there were some adjustments that had to be made. You know, Vlad and team are, you know, they’re very technically oriented.

They’re very bright. Really great, great group of of people that work there. But, you know, they have they’re they’re really anchored on first principles thinking, they question everything. So, like, when I walk in the door and Vlad’s like, what what’s the first thing we need to do? We need to fix our charting.

It sucks. He’s like, every brokerage firm has charting. I’m like, every car has four wheels. There’s a reason. That’s what customers want.

Like, you don’t we can question a lot of things in the brokerage space, but there’s some we don’t question. You just do it because you know that’s what customers want. That’s it it’s just a healthy, I don’t I don’t wanna call tension. It’s a healthy back and forth that I think makes us deliver for customers in a way that’s pretty cool. And so I really love it.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: So I’m gonna I’m gonna press on that. I spent some time with the CFO, I don’t know, in the last couple of weeks. And I got some insights into your CEO and his management style. So from your perspective, again, you’ve worked at a number of different places. Maybe talk about the culture of Robinhood, how it’s different than some of the other places that you’ve worked at.

Talk about the drive to innovate, how you’re getting new ideas to market, and how that is sort of driven by Vlad and his his style.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: I think one one of the things that I I really think is, and by the way, I competed with Robinhood before I worked for Robinhood. I never imagined when I was working for Schwab that I would compete with Robinhood. I actually had this conversation with the executives of Schwab. I’m like, hey, are you worried about this firm right down here that just got 20,000,000 customers in four years? It took us six decades.

Like, I would we’re concerned. I was very concerned at TD Ameritrade. I’m like, man, they they captured lightning in a bottle here. And they’re getting the next generation of investors. We’re trying to hold on to yesterday’s, you know, generation of investors.

So the the thought was always we needed to to build a muscle to be able to and what I’m I’m talking as a competitor, to be able to attract that next generation of investors quicker than they were going to build out the rest of their offerings so that they didn’t lose those investors, right, because we didn’t have enough of what they needed from a retirement account, joint accounts, you know, all the things, tax lots. So when when we think about those things, Vlad is very aggressive, and and he really wants to make sure that we we get everything built out so that we can accommodate those customers. But he also does it in in such a way that is, I’m not just gonna do it the way that every other brokerage firm has done it. I would like to do it in a manner like, we have a fresh canvas. We have a clean slate.

We we haven’t done these things before, so we can build it in a way that’s more accommodating to customers and maybe delivers more value to them. And and Vlad’s really anchored on that. Like, he is very anchored on making sure that we’re delivering things for customers in a way that, you know, it’s gonna delight them and they’ll they’ll reward us with more business.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Yeah. So let’s wrap up on sort of the higher level questions before we we dig in a little deeper. The highlight reel over the last twelve months. So market cap more than doubled. Give us a little bit more about what the last twelve months have brought for for Robinhood, how you’ve developed, how things have improved, how you’ve grown, and that’ll set the stage for for the the next round of questions.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Sure. There so there’s Vlad, if you if you listen to our earnings call or any of our investor days, we talk about three things, basically three pillars. One is focusing on the more active traders. We set ambitious goals to be number one. We are very close to our largest competitor in both the equity and option space, and you can see that.

I know Chris and team have been sharing our progress, but you can see it on a monthly basis. They see it. They can see it in the six zero sixes. And we’ll get there. We’ll get there pretty quickly.

But that isn’t the the focal point isn’t just saying I wanna be number one. The focal point is delivering for customers in such a way that they’re gonna reward you to be number one. And the starting point, when I started here, we were losing ACATs to every broker on the street. When I started here You have

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: to tell what an ACAT is.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Okay. Sorry. That means if I transfer my account, like either transfer my account from Fidelity to Robinhood or from Robinhood to Fidelity. We were losing ACATs to everybody. We’re net positive to everybody, including IBKR, much to the dismay of Thomas, who I like a lot, but he he likes to talk about it.

He used to say, Robinhood’s a great feeder for us. You know, we we take accounts from every month. He doesn’t say that anymore because we’re taking accounts from them. And that’s valuable because it’s not just growing our own 20 nearly 26,000,000 customers as they continue to evolve, but it’s bringing in large customers from other brokerage firms. And I think that’s been a real step change for us.

Part of doing that is just delivering on all the things that we know we needed to do from a from an active trading standpoint. That’s new asset classes, index options, futures, building a web based built web based application. So that part of the journey has been going very, very well. It kind of feeds into the second part of the journey. If you think about Robinhood’s success, it’s almost been exclusively on the self directed side.

Self directed pie is this big. The the wealth management side of the pie is multiples of that, and we really haven’t done much in there, but we’re starting to. So we started with strategies, which is an advisory product, bought a company called TradePMR, and we’re extending into banking. And and not direct banking, but what I’ll call private banking. And all those things are delivering an ecosystem which permits customers to do anything they want from financial service standpoint with Robinhood.

And they sort of feed on each other. They’re a flywheel. So we’ve had we’ve started to have some really strong success there, but we have a long way to go in that area. But we’re seeing great results. Our retirement account, as it’s I think we’ve shared, it’s 17,000,000,000 So we’re starting to see some very, very strong progress.

And finally, the last component of that is you’re building all these capabilities for an audience of just domestic users. A lot of these are desired by people all over the globe. And when we go around, I’ve had experience running businesses outside of The US, there’s this very strong desire by people all over the globe to invest in The US markets. There’s also a very strong desire by the elected officials and the regulators and everybody in those countries to have better than a 20% participation rate in their countries. We are close to 60 here, so we’re the envy of the world.

Robinhood gets credited for a lot of that because we brought a lot of young people into the marketplace. So the doors are open when we go to talk to them and talk about expanding into their region. We’re in The UK. We’re in the process of getting licensed in Singapore. Just bought a firm in in Canada.

And you should expect us to be pretty aggressive with our expansion across the globe. And I think there’s a great opportunity there because 85% of what you build in The US, you can use elsewhere. There’s configurations that need to be done for retirement accounts or things, but the core of the business is completely reusable.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Yeah. I think one of the the takeaways I’ve considered in the last six months is you’ve come so far. You’re you’re you’re so big, but your capabilities are still relatively small relative to what we see elsewhere, but yet you’ve accomplished so much. Yep. And it’s like as you continue to build out these capabilities, it’s only gonna accrue to to to to, you know, more growth.

I wanted to to dig into it starts starts to dig in more active traders. So active traders is a big initiative. I don’t know. I would consider it one of the better parts or best parts of the brokerage business. So maybe first start by, what is an active trader and and and why focus here?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Everybody has a different definition of an active trader. Every brokerage firm I’m in has a different definition of an active trader. Thirty times a month, whatever, they’re all different. Basically, it’s just an engaged you know, it’s an engaged individual from an investing standpoint. And there’s always every single brokerage firm I’ve been in since I started in this business has said, oh, this is a flash in the pan.

They’re they’re, you know, they’re active, but they’re not gonna remain active. And it’s funny when you talk to the people who are active, and I am one, so I I understand this. I don’t really care what you think of me. I don’t care if you think that I trade too much, and that I’m not gonna make money because I trade too much. I I can see my own results.

It doesn’t really phase me what you think of me. That’s kind of the mantra that you’ll you hear from people who who trade more actively. And by the way, it’s not something that they necessarily do all the time. It’s it can be episodic. And what I mean by that is, I’m a young person who has fewer responsibility.

I don’t have kids yet. I don’t have you know, I’m I’m at a a point in my investing journey where I have more time to dedicate to it. You’ll see them be more active. Then I get to a point where maybe my pool of assets is such that I don’t feel comfortable with all this, and we hear this loud and clear from our customers. One of the reasons we built strategies and bought an IRA RIA firm is because they say, well, I’m comfortable managing a quarter of these assets.

I want somebody else to help me with this component of it. Building for them is very valuable because they’re really engaged and they’re passionate about what they do. And to your point, it is an extremely lucrative component of every brokerage firm. And so catering to those people is really strong. The value that you get when you cater to those people is everything you build for them cascades to everybody.

It doesn’t like, I like to use this analogy. Again, when I first got to Robinhood, our worst NPS scores were for our most active traders. And I’m like, this is idiotic.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: What what are m NPS scores?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Sorry. Our Net Promoter Score. So in other words, the way we measure their I I gotta quit using these terms. My apology. The way we measure, you know, the satisfaction with Robinhood indicated that the people who use Robinhood the most were least satisfied with it.

And I’m like, this is completely upside down. We’re gonna fix this. Right? And the analogy I use, because I I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. We are a super mission driven driven company.

There are a lot of young people who say, you know, we don’t build better things for people who are more active. Everybody gets a fair shake. Totally agree. Right? You can accomplish both of these things at the same time.

Effectively, the analogy I use with them is, think of a walker, a jogger, a runner, or a marathoner going down a sidewalk. The per they’re all hitting the cracks in the sidewalk. The people who are sprinting are hitting them more frequently. You’re not you aren’t necessarily building a better experience for the more active, you are actually building a better experience for everybody. They’re just ex experiencing the better experience more frequently.

Right? So we reversed that. Now our highest NPS is the most active. That’s how you should be. Right?

The people who are those are the ones that are gonna recommend their friends who are also more active, and that’s where we are right now.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Yeah. So maybe some examples of of what you’re building for the active trader and that’s sort of playing out for the rest of the the user base as well. Maybe start with Legend. What is Legend? You really have been a mobile based company up until this point, and you’ve, you know, 25,000,000 accounts.

Like, you’re a big firm for just being mobile. Legend is the desktop. What is it? Why build it? And what does this bring in terms of opportunity for more usability and more growth?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Yeah. So I want to say 95% of all the trading up until recently was done here on a mobile device at Robinhood, which is pretty cool. If you think about the world today and by the way, since I’ve been in the business, the percentage of trading that’s happened on this has only gone up, and it’s only gonna go up. There’s a reason for that. Asset classes trade around the clock today.

We we built ones that trade around the clock, both futures, crypto, and now thousand symbols that trade around the clock. Sunday was one of our busiest days, Sunday night, because of all the tariff news. So people don’t carry around a laptop. They carry around this. Right?

So this gives them access to view that portfolio, see what’s happening in the marketplace, and take action if they decide to. However, there’s a as I kind of talked about earlier, there’s a large contingent of our current customers that are getting to a point where their needs are such that they they can’t use this solely. Like, they need a complement or a primary, which is a web based app. Same thing we heard loud and clear from a lot of the customers we’re pulling from other brokerage firms who are larger, probably a little older, and have established a habit where they’re using a web based app and a mobile as a complement. There’s another thing that happened in the last couple of years.

There were two firms, very large firms, that were gobbled up, Vtrade and TD Ameritrade. I have a lot of familiarity with them. And they were force migrated on the technologies that they didn’t want to be force migrated to. So when you have that number of customers, largest number of customers that I think we’ve ever seen I’ll ever see in my lifetime, and these are active customers being pushed, to what I’ll call legacy technologies, there’s a lot of disruption. And disruption means they look around.

And one of the things that they made that we heard loud and clear was, you know, we we love Robinhood. It it could be a suitable alternative for us, but we’re gonna need a web based complement. And so that was another catalyst for doing so, and we saw strong traction as a result of that. But we’ve seen good traction so far with Robinhood, with Legend. One of the things listen, in my entire career, every time I introduce a new technology, product, asset class, everything, all I hear from my CFO and everybody else, oh my god, is this going to cannibalize trading on this?

Is this going to cannibalize? So we’re very, very diligently looking at that. It’s additive. Same thing with futures, same thing with index options. We’re very, very careful to make sure that everything that we add to the offering is additive to the customer, but of course, to us as well.

And I think one of the things that if if if you anchor on your most valuable customers in my history, they’re the ones that utilize all your technology and all your asset classes. So by adding more, they’re just going to do more business with you because they have more opportunities to take advantage of investment or trading opportunities.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Okay. So we’ve got about fifteen minutes left. I’ve got a couple topics I want to hit. I wanted to ask the audience, do you guys have questions that you want me to allocate reasonable time for? Give me a nod or or some sign that lets me know that you wanna ask questions.

Otherwise, I’m gonna try to fill most of the time. Okay. We’ll okay. So the next topic I wanna

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: hit I think he he

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: raised You you I’ll get your question

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Oh, got it.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Okay. Toward towards the end. I just wanna make sure I allowed enough time. So one of the areas that I’m excited about, maybe most excited about, prediction markets.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Okay.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Okay. So Robinhood’s rolled out contracts in prediction markets. You’ve traded a billion contracts plus at this point around elections and and other events. So maybe describe what are prediction markets? How is this different than online gambling and sports betting?

Like, what what really is what you’re building here today?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: So prediction markets are run under the CFTC. So they’re part of, well, basically our FCM, our futures entity. And our first foray into the prediction markets was the election. And we rolled those out a week before the election. As you said, I think we had 600,000,000 contracts traded and about 800,000 accounts open in a week.

There’s clearly interest. And I think the interest was really around and we saw it because we sat in an office in New York and watched everything unfold. And essentially, before the networks were declaring the swing states, we saw the prediction market go like this. And as a result, we saw test we saw the stocks and the cryptocurrencies that were gonna benefit from a Trump victory take off probably two hours before there was an announcement. And what what really we were seeing was the way that information, market moving information, is being delivered.

And our customers have a strong desire to either participate in that directly or to use that information to say, okay, let me have an advantage here in understanding what’s going to move when and take advantage of that. We followed that up with contracts on on the Fed’s move, on some sports contracts. I think there’s some uncertainty on exactly where this is gonna go. The differentiation between, as you said, sort of online sports is we are we have no incentive for our customers to lose, which is the opposite of what everybody else in the sports world or most other entities in the sports world would do. In other words, if you if you wager on something and you lose, I win.

We we don’t all we are is facilitating it. We’re an exchange, basically. We’re facilitating people going back and forth on these things. As far as where it’s going to go, we have a whole strategy around it, and it’s largely sports is a component of it, but I think there’s huge components of it that are going to be really interesting. And this isn’t like the derivatives of this are not new.

Like, I started my career in the Chicago trading pits, and the commodities markets realized it was very silly. Like, when there’s a drought and the commodities were going up, as soon as it rained in Chicago, all the commodities went down, even though nothing is growing in Chicago, so they created weather derivatives. So where I’m going with this is like, we hear this frustration constantly from our customers. I did my homework on Apple. I knew exactly how many devices were gonna be sold.

I did this, this, this. They came out with their earnings. I nailed it. And then their guidance went, and they went like this. And they’re like, why can’t I just why can’t I have a contract or something that says, I did my homework and did all these things right, and I should be rewarded for that?

And so that’s where I think this is gonna get super interesting, because you’re gonna see these derivatives on investing that will be they’ll be more precise than what you’re seeing, today, you know, in in terms of some of the things that are happening in the investing world. Another example of it, and this is a very con you know, it’s one that sort of gets a lot of attention as well, Short dated options. Short dated options. Everybody, oh my god, these things, you know, people are trading them too much. If if you hold an Apple position and I tell you exactly what day you have 40% gains.

I tell you exactly what day that’s going to be subject to a down move. Would you like to buy insurance for a month or a day? I think you want to buy it for a day. Right? A little cheaper?

That’s that’s what’s happening. It’s just allowing more precision in your investing, which is exactly what customers want. Yep.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Where is that market today in terms of contracts listed? And then

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: The prediction

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified: market. The

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: prediction And then, you know, let’s let’s put on the or get out the crystal ball. What what could that look like in twelve months from now? And then let’s dream the dream and go out three years. What does it look like today? What does it look like in a year?

What could it look like in I don’t know. I said three years. Yeah. Sometime in the future. Because it seems like there’s a a lot of potential from where we are today.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: So a couple things are happening. Number one, you know, there’s like like some other areas, I think there’ll be some more regulatory clarity on what exactly is gonna be permissible and what’s not. We welcome that. We’ll abide by whatever that clarity is. We’ve done the same thing on the crypto side.

Where it’s going to go, I think it becomes an information market. And by the way, should assume that this has caught the attention of every exchange, every brokerage firm, every entity that sort of lies in between those two. They can see the interest. They can see the numbers. You know, billion contracts is a lot of contracts, like talk to an exchange.

So my anticipation is this will continue to grow and evolve. You’ll get more participants in here. But I think there’ll be some really cool tangents that’ll happen in the investing world, where you’ll be able to, again, draw another derivative off of what already exists. And another cool thing about these is, like many other asset classes, and it’s my belief that every asset class will be this way in a couple years, they’ll trade around the clock. Everything’s going to trade around the clock.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Okay. So let’s open it up to Q and A. We’ve got about seven minutes left. We’ll start front row. Wait for the mic.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Oh, you got passed by.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: I’ll just go quick because I’m right here. Is this on? Mean, I just have a question about just sort of what does Robinhood stand for, I guess. I mean, called it prediction markets and asset class.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Yep.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: I guess at what point what does the company stand for? You’re about people having their retirement savings, and yet, I mean, I have the app and it wants me to bet on who’s going win the PGA.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Yep.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: So let’s just say just as an example, let’s just say that betting on the lottery was legitimized on an app. Yep. Like, that was legal.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Mhmm.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: People do it.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Yep.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: And then you’d have a financial incentive to enable that because people are doing it. Is that an asset class? And is that something like Robinhood? Like, where where what do you what do you sort of stand for,

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: I guess? We we have so many conversations and are continuing to have conversations on this because it’s it’s a good point. Like, we’re like but I would here’s the point I would make. Sports is an asset class. It is absolutely an asset class.

The entities around sports are an asset class. Now what derivative of that? How far do we go? How far does the industry go? That’s that’s gonna be the debate.

But, some of the same arguments that have sort of come up here have exist around other asset classes as well. And some of those asset classes are now mainstream. So I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen here, but I think and to your point, we have a lot of conversations about this. Because, look, if you if if people don’t wanna see it, they can they can configure their app not to see it. We give them that capability.

We haven’t had a lot of people that have done that yet, but it is something that we debate pretty hotly.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Thanks. Yeah. Just to pick up where you left off on 20 fourseven trading of multiple different assets, I was hoping could you comment on whether there’s kind of an intersection between crypto, what you’re buying at Bitstamp, international and twenty fourseven? Because when I’m thinking about like the regulatory burden of entering all these little countries, Is there a way that maybe you tokenize like the top 200 or 1,000 stocks, partner with Tether, stick it on Bitstamp, and that becomes Robinhood International for trading as sort of a way to accelerate international adoption?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Yeah. So I’ll start with the highest level of it, which is why we built twenty four five trading to begin with. It’s not only US. It’s international interest. Like, we’re the largest player in the in the overnight sessions.

And as I said, like, I think Sunday was our highest volume ever. But the week of the tariffs, April ’11, that was the most volume we’ve ever done. And obviously, it’s caught the attention of every exchange because they’re all coming out. And we pushed them at the beginning of this to come out because we prefer to have optionality, not tethered to one exchange. But the second part of your question is like, basically, you’re talking about tokenization of not only stocks, but whatever, right, And essentially removing borders, like, which is you can imagine a world where you tokenize things and the borders are just removed.

That is something, if you’ve read Vlad’s op ed in WAPO, I mean, he we are actively pursuing and looking at. Because I think there are opportunities to be able to deliver for the rest of the world in a way that haven’t been presented before, largely because of technology and some of the capabilities that we have and the entities that we’ve acquired or that we are partnering with. So it’s exciting.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Is that something we could see Like like, is it I’m just trying to understand

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: how Quickly?

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Well, just how how much is this theoretical, and how much is it something that could really happen?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Oh, it’s not theoretical. I mean, it is theoretical because you don’t we don’t know all the contours of it. But, you know, if there’s one thing I think everybody has a good understanding of Robinhood is we’re gonna be on the cutting edge of it. We’ll be first. And so you can assume that we’re already actively pursuing these things, which is interesting.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Awesome. Thank you.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Of course.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Okay. We have time for one ish more question. Any other questions in the audience?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: If not, I have something I wouldn’t mind talking about.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Oh, okay. Yeah. What would you like to talk about?

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: I am I’ll tell you what I’m kinda giddy about. So we bought a company called Trade BMR, an advisory firm, RIA. And there’s this actually very, very cool thing that’s happening. There’s a hundred and $24,000,000,000,000 wealth transfer that’s happening. It’s already started.

So essentially, this money is being passed down. And what what we’ve you know, we’re doing so much research on this. What we’ve discovered is it’s not even being passed down, in some instances, to people’s kids. People are living longer, so it’s being passed down to their kids’ kids. Right?

Because if I’m that age and my kids are 65, they probably don’t need the money, but their kids do. And as a result of that, you know, you probably all know this statistic, but 70% of people, when they inherit wealth, fire their adviser. That’s the first thing they do. And so advisers are are just absolutely yearning to have a connectivity to the people who are getting that money. Do you know where those people are?

They’re at Robinhood. There’s 26,000,000 of them that are gonna be recipients of that. And so there is such an amazing opportunity here, And this is what we’ve been working on, is a way to create basically a referral program that allows these advisors to have access to the customers here and the customers coming here that that want help in their investing. And if you understand that advisory space, it’s been a little stagnant. I think the last interesting thing that happened on the advisory side was robo in 2010.

And so we’ve had we’ve done a good job of sort of bringing some new innovation and fresh thinking on the self directed side. I think there’s a massive opportunity on this side of the business. And we’re focused on it. Is that that Well, it would be yeah. It’d be the advisory model.

So they would you know, they’ll use the same model that they currently use today. Yeah. And they have, you know, they’re, I think, they’re $43,000,000,000 in assets. So small, not not a massive firm like the Schwab Fidelity, but that space has gotten a little tight with two major custodians. And so somebody coming into this space with an opportunity to bring new ideas and innovation there is gonna be we’ve already heard from a lot of advisers.

They’re welcoming it.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, JPMorgan: Steve, thank you very much. It’s been a true pleasure to have you here again today. Thank you everybody for participating and coming to JPMorgan.

Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, Robinhood: Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.