Okay. Good morning, everyone. I'm Devin Ryan, head of Financial Technology Research here at Citizens. Really pleased to be sitting next to Shiv Verma, who is CFO of Robinhood, I think, as of a few weeks ago formally. We're all looking forward to you stepping into this role and obviously, you know, I think a key architect of a lot of the growth and initiatives at Robinhood over more than a handful of years. I've always loved spending time with you, Shiv, 'cause I just— I appreciate your perspective on the space. I think you have such a good kind of worldview of the fintech landscape, but also where Robinhood is going.
You know, it's been a fun story to follow as an analyst, and so looking forward to this conversation here. Where I wanna start, before we kinda get into, I think the bigger picture is just the landscape over the past couple of months here have been pretty volatile in the markets, particularly in parts of the market that are maybe higher risk pockets, whether it's, you know, crypto volatility or, you know, tech stocks. Love to start with kinda how your customer base is behaving in this backdrop.
We just wrapped up February, I don't know if there's anything you can share around whether they're buying the dip or how they're reacting to some of this volatility, which I know can create opportunities, but at the same time can be a little bit unsettling in the moment.
Yeah. No. First, thank you for having me. Yeah, we've known each other almost the full eight years I've been here, very excited to be up here with you. It's a great question. Big picture, our customers are healthy, they're doing the same thing a lot of institutional investors are doing. They're relooking at their portfolio. They tend to be net buyers. They tend to be techno-optimists, during periods of volatility, they tend to lean in a little bit. You know, a little bit I'll tell you about what we're seeing in February. Our North Star is net deposits.
We saw over $5.5 billion of net deposits in February alone, over $10 billion to start the year. Really healthy engagement. On trading, you know, a couple of things I'll share with you. Equities and options were both up year-over-year in February, so again, really healthy engagement. Then crypto was up month-over-month from January. We'll release full monthly metrics in a week or so, but I think just wanted to preview that, yeah, our customers are excited. They're leaning in. They're doing their work. They're looking at their portfolio, but everything we're seeing is engagement is really healthy.
Yeah. Are they rotating around what they're doing, or is it just kinda stick to the same strategy and just do more of the same? Like, do you see changes when you have these couple months of volatility?
Yeah. I think customers tend to use it, what are the names that they love for the long term, what can I go in and buy at 50% discount that it was before? You see a little bit of rotation, again, similar to institutional investors, they're doing their work, it's a lot of the big tech names that they like, a lot of the consumer names that they like, where, you know, relative to even three, six months ago are much lower multiples, they're using these opportunities to come in and either dollar-cost average or add to their position.
Got it. Okay. fantastic. I wanna zoom out here a little bit. You know, investor conversations I've had recently, you know, people are asking, you know, Robinhood had such a great 2025. You look at Wall Street estimates for revenue growth in 2026, the kind of the growth rate's slowing a little bit. The question is like, is 2026 a digestion year for the company after, you know, what was such a great 2025? How do we think about it? Take a step back and you had $50 billion of deposits in 2025.
I think you had $17 billion in 2023, and over half of that $50 billion came from products that you didn't even have in 2023. When I think about the roadmap of Robinhood, how many new products have come into the system, it seems like you planted a lot of seeds in 2024 and 2025 that should be contributing. How would you answer that question? Is 2026 a digestion year, or is this just a continuation of what we've been seeing over the past couple?
Yeah, great question. Big picture, 2026, we wanna go even faster. I wouldn't call it a year of digestion. We're putting our foot on the gas. Couple things we shared on our earnings call. There's things that are important to us. First is our product velocity. That is one of our North Stars. We need to be shipping faster. We need to be delivering for customers. Our roadmap is still full, so our goal is to go even faster than we did last year. One of the things we're gonna keep focusing on is net deposits. We've said before, and we said in our last earnings, our goal is on an annualized basis, can we go 20%+?
We believe that the roadmap we have is able to deliver that. We're gonna do it profitably, though. To your point, we've done a lot. We've been building for the past few years. We're in brokerage, we're in crypto, we're in money. The way we balance our product velocity is profitable growth. That allows you to be disciplined. That allows you to stay focused. We have to keep investing. We are a growth company. That's not gonna change. If anything, you should see it accelerate even faster.
You know, you mentioned last year we did $68 billion of net deposits at a 35% annualized growth rate. It won't always be linear, but the seeds we were planting years ago, you're now starting to see the fruition, and that's what we're gonna keep doing this year as well.
Yeah. One area that is obviously driving that growth is prediction markets. Probably the hottest topic in finance right now, you guys are kind of in the middle of it. Another example of maybe if people thought that we'd see kind of this plateau or even slowing down early in the year after the football season and, you know, January, February metrics look pretty good there. Talk a little bit about how you see prediction markets within Robinhood. What? Is this the first inning of something that's gonna be much bigger? Or, how do you view it? Then how do we evolve beyond sports? I think there's a big question around it.
It's sports gambling. I know you guys have a perspective this is probably something much bigger than that. Just talk a little bit about what it is today for Robinhood, and then how do we get from where we are today to becoming this much bigger category?
Oh, absolutely. We believe we're at the start of prediction market supercycle. This is just the beginning, early innings. When we think of what prediction markets could be, our mental model is a digital newspaper and source of information. Whether you're looking for economics, financials, lifestyle, sports. Everything there is instantly and in real time. A couple ways we expand it from here. First is just product selection. That's what we've been working on. You know, we have close to 2,000 different assets in the platform today, and our customers are asking for more. That's one thing we're really making investment in. The second is just the product experience.
It's only a year old. Our product teams are really making sure that it's got good discoverability, people understand how to use it, how does it interplay with other parts of the app, and so you'll see that in the near term. Another thing we're gonna be focused on the near term is how do you make everything on Robinhood better? One of the things we have different from our competitors is we have brokerage, we have crypto, we have prediction markets. There's a really interesting interplay between these. For example, some of the prediction markets can be, what is the KPI?
We did deliveries for Tesla, for example. If you're a Tesla shareholder and you're on the stock detail page looking at Tesla, you can also see real-time information on there. You're gonna see us integrating that a little bit. In the medium term, another thing we're super excited about is Rothera, the JV that we just did. We're now vertically integrating like we always do there, so you're gonna see us making investments on there. Lastly, right now it's just a U.S. product, but how do you make it a global product as well, and how do you make it from retail to institutional? There's a lot packed in there.
Yeah.
Big picture, like, yeah, we are at the beginning of what we think is the supercycle.
Yeah. You mentioned institutional. This is obviously a product you can imagine that institutions are also gonna be pretty interested in economic events and earnings events. Like, how do you, as a firm, you're obviously very retail focused, but how do you bring in more institutions which will bring more liquidity? Ultimately, in my view, probably bring a lot more revenues to Robin, and particularly with the exchange and the JV that you just mentioned. How do you guys play a role in doing that?
When you look at our three arcs, the third arcs is global financial ecosystem. Ecosystem is there specifically because that means institutional and that means B2B. We start institutional through some M&A. We bought Bitstamp, the crypto exchange. We're now an institutional player. We bought TradePMR, a B2B custodian, and so we're already in institutional. When you talk to institutional customers on prediction markets or something else, they want the same thing retail wants: great design, low cost, ease of use, and all their assets in one place.
That's the same exact thing we can do. Rothera is gonna be a great way to do this. We will now be able to onboard institutional customers as well who wanna trade with our exchange. That in turn will bring more liquidity, and that'll give better execution for our retail customers, so there's a really natural synergy there. In addition to vertically integrating, it's another vector in to go into the institutional space as well.
Yeah. We're just gonna go rapid fire here.
Let's do it.
I have so much for you, Shiv. On the private markets, another kind of newer area for the company, you and Vlad have said this could be bigger than prediction markets. Go to the next one. You just launched kind of the first major product in private markets. Talk about what the vision is for private markets for Robinhood, and how does this become something that is much bigger than probably one product? Like, what is the sequencing and the roadmap there?
Yeah, great question. This is one where I'm personally spending a lot of time, super passionate about this. We actually have our first fund in market this week, and it's taking orders, excited to finally get that out to customers. There's kinda two big vectors to do that. The first is Robinhood Ventures, and the second is tokenization. Robinhood Ventures, this is what we started today. That is the parent umbrella. It's a new RIA advisory. We think the best way to give access to retail and institutional is through these listed 40 Act funds.
Paul Atkins of the SEC gave a speech last year where he said the best way for retail to access private markets is not anything new, it's these fund structures that already exist. Our first fund is out there, but one way to really get this out there is to keep doing new funds, give customers new engagement, and there's a lot of interesting asset classes you can put out there. Anything that institutional can access that retail can't, you can do it in the venture format. It has a couple of key benefits. One, daily liquidity because it's exchange traded.
Two, you don't need to be accredited. 85%-90% of Americans are not accredited. You ask how can this be as bigger than prediction markets, that's a key thing there. Third, in kind of true Robinhood fashion, low fees and no carry. That's super important to retail customers, but also to institutional. The other way to do it is through tokenization. We started that in Europe, where we have regulatory clarity, and we started with publicly listed equities. We also showed that you can do private equities. We started with 200 listed tokens last year.
We're now up to 2,000, so we've 10x-ed in just about a span of a year, and this is just the beginning. Any asset that you have, there's no reason it can't be tokenized. You can look at real estate, you can look at credit. We're starting with kind of public equities, but going there. If you combine those two together, ventures plus tokenization, it's a really massive opportunity, and we're at the forefront.
Yeah. It's not just about gathering assets and delivering a private market fund to an end investor, but there's a lot of other ways to potentially monetize being in this marketplace, and that's connection of tokenization and others as well, right?
You can be the fund administration, to your point. You could be the custodian of the tokenized asset. You could be the one that trades the actual assets. We also have tokenized money market funds in Europe, so you can be the one issuing the money market funds. There's a lot of different ways. Big picture, when we talk to customers, private assets is the number one thing they want right now. We wanna do for private markets what we did for public markets. We're very early days here, but yeah, I think the TAM and opportunity here is pretty massive.
Yeah. We'll come back to tokenization, but just in crypto overall. You guys were early to delivering access to crypto for your customer base. You know, it feels like we're at this, you know, really pivotal moment for the space. We're going from primarily speculating on crypto tokens to actually crypto tokens, ETH, Solana, et cetera, being used as commodities to power the blockchains. They become utility tokens, which is what they always have been. Now we're progressing from kind of pilot phase to mainstream adoption.
How do you think about crypto, delivering it for your customers, and where do you feel like we are in that progression? Like, you guys were early. You saw it wasn't just pure speculation, but there's a bigger picture here. How do you feel about it today and this moment where we're probably on the verge of hopefully getting some legislative clarity with the Clarity Act, kind of what that means for the space at Robinhood?
Crypto, again, I think we're early days. We're big fans of the technology, there's lots of different ways it could go. If you start just with the retail component, we started as more of a casual trader product. We announced last year our smart exchange routing, where active traders can come in, the more you trade, the better deal you get, similar to some of our competitors. Seeing really good engagement there, that's causing us to grow market share. You know, I mentioned on the earnings call, as a result of that, our take rate was down a little bit. It'll probably be down about 7 basis points quarter-over-quarter. Mainly, that's because we're seeing active traders come in.
That was a big initiative. You step outside of retail, we're going to institutional. I mentioned the Bitstamp exchange. We think institutional is gonna be a large component of that market. The next thing we're doing is we're going global. We started in the U.S., we're now in the E.U., and we're going other countries as well. The last piece that you mentioned is you can use the technology to power other things. Tokenization is a great example. We just announced last week the Robinhood Chain, that's how you can build on top of our own chain.
It's in the testnet phase, and we're seeing really good adoption there. Those are some of the new use cases you're gonna see. It's not just gonna be retail trading, but it's gonna be institutional, it's gonna be global, it's gonna be tokenization, it's gonna be having your own chain. We're super excited to keep building in the space.
Yeah. I think it's becoming more tangible for people as they, you know, obviously Stablecoin's very tangible, and then, oh, tokenizing real assets versus just speculating on the token itself, right, on ETH or Solana or others. What do you think the timeline of, like, getting to more mainstream tokenization is? I know, you know, probably legislation will help, but you're seeing regulators like the SEC and CFTC taking the steps that are necessary even without getting legislation.
We're talking about it, but is this a 2026 story? Would actually be materials at 2027, 2028, or is it, like how do you think about, like, a sequencing and timing of when this becomes, like, a material business for Robinhood? Seems like it's more than just trading, it's a lot of other areas where you guys are gonna be involved.
Yeah. On the trading side, you know, last year it was close to almost $1 billion of revenue, big picture was, you know, about 18% of our revenue, still relatively small compared to brokerage. I think it's in the near term. The technology exists. If you look what we've done overseas, we can already tokenize. The tokenization engine already exists. There's no reason you can't just port it over to the U.S. There's a couple things that we're looking for. One is regulatory clarity will obviously help. That will help, in terms of the rules and guidelines. I think you're already starting to see institutional come in.
Again, if you get regulatory clarity, you'll start to see institutional come in there as well. You're starting to see some of these real-world use cases really take hold. I mentioned we're tokenizing money market funds. That was an initial proof of concept, but it works. You found product market fit. We're already getting inbounds from people who are coming up to us, real use cases where you can tokenize assets.
Take anything on the credit cycle or mortgage cycle, things like that. I actually think we're not that far distant in the future. The technology already exists. If we can get a little bit of regulatory clarity, I think there's gonna be a pretty big tailwind behind it.
Yeah. Robinhood as a technology firm, but a financial firm with customers, huge distribution, you kinda connect the two together. Do you like, obviously, there's trading, but do you see yourself as, like, an infrastructure layer and then ultimately, like, a capital raiser, like, this becomes a new capital markets infrastructure for where Robinhood can be at the center of something that's new but probably the future?
Yes. Absolutely. Yes, we started in trading, and we found product market fit there, but we think it's much broader than that. The first foray was institutional. The next thing is That allows you to vertically integrate that, but can you do that even more? When you can tokenize assets, to your point, you can start to become a center of capital markets. One part that we think really plays in nicely to Robinhood Ventures is if you're a company, you can span your whole life cycle on Robinhood. You can raise your first capital on Robinhood, whether it's through Robinhood Ventures or through tokenization.
You can do follow-on investments. We can help you go public. We've already done 50+ IPOs. We can support you in the public markets as well. Tokenization and blockchain is just another way to do that. Yeah, the vision is not just to become a trading platform, it's to be vertically integrated, institutional, global, and also to help be the infrastructure that powers that as well.
Artificial intelligence, I'm sure no one wants to talk about that. It's, like, my view is that this is going to be such a big deal for the brokerage space, the ones that are embracing it, then you kinda go to this next world of agentic and what that could mean for trading activity. Obviously, you're already delivering tools that are integrating AI, but, you know, I think probably maybe another phase will be having agents going on behalf of customers, and that can drive essentially the tail of your customer base that's maybe less active towards the most active or maybe a multiplier on that.
Talk from a product perspective, where are we with AI with Robinhood today? How do you see the future? Then what is the pushback to somebody says, "I think AI is gonna disrupt Robinhood 'cause there's gonna be a bunch of agents, and you don't need a wallet or a brokerage account"?
It's a great question. We think AI is here to stay, and we're at the forefront. If you look at financial services and who has the right to win in AI, it's gonna be Robinhood. Our founder is a PhD in Math. He has a second company that's AI native, and so this is one we're heavily invested in. I'll give you a couple different vectors of where we're investing in. The first is software development. Again, we've been talking about that for years. When OpenAI Enterprise came out, Vlad was on the phone with Sam the first weekend. We were one of the early adopters.
We're seeing really good productivity gains there, and it's just getting started. The second is on operations. You know, we started with customer service. We're then doing fraud ops, account ops, all of those. It is allowing us to grow in the volume but keep our expenses low. The models are just getting better and better. You know, we've said before about 75% of our customer service tickets are now answered through AI. That is drastic improvement from just a few years ago and still getting better. The third and the most exciting is the consumer-facing part.
Yeah.
What are we doing there? We have a couple things. Cortex is our brand for our AI products. We announced last year, Cortex Digests. It goes in there, and it can tell you why is the stock moving, why is your portfolio moving. For me, personally, it has changed the way I engage with the app. The first thing I do in the morning is I open it up, it tells me what's going in the portfolio, it synthesizes all of it. I can go to each individual stock. Customers are loving that. The second thing we're working on, which we shared at our event last year, is what we're calling scanners and screener.
You wanna go in and ask, "Hey, with the software sell-off, can you tell me all companies that are below this market cap and this EV and their valuation has changed?" You can talk to it in natural language, and it'll do that. That's a big one. The third is what we announced as our AI assistant. That should be embedded throughout Robinhood. Anything you wanna do within the app or on the web, there's an AI tool there to help you there. These are really, really early days, but yeah, big picture, it's gonna make it even better.
You should be at a disadvantage if you're not trading on Robinhood specifically for these things. To your last point about being disruption, it is early. Nobody knows what's gonna happen, but the best way to do it is to just keep investing and be at the forefront. Whenever it comes there, you can be the one that's leading the charge there, rather than the two kids at YC that are coming out.
Yeah. What about just the agentic piece of it and having agents? Is that a regulatory hurdle that we need to figure that piece out, or do you think that's not too far in the future where, yeah, you essentially plug in, here are the characteristics of what I want, and I don't have all day long to be looking at my screen, but this is what I want you to do, and go do it? All of a sudden you're empowering an agent to go on your behalf, and I can imagine they're gonna be a lot more active in the market than I would be if I'm in a meeting all day. How do you see that playing out? What's the timeline of getting to there?
Yeah. If you look at the spectrum, the first thing is, I want tools. The second thing is, I want the agent to help me do what I wanna do. The third thing is just have the agent do the whole thing. I think the first two were basically there, and the products are coming out. The third one, it's actually not the technology, it's more just regulatory clarity. On Reg BI rules, you have to be careful as a brokerage and what recommendations you give.
Yep.
We're having really good discussions with dialogue with the regulators 'cause they understand. They know this is a nascent technology. We wanna do it the right way. We wanna work with them. I do think we're gonna need a little bit of clarity there, but that's coming, and if that happens, I think you can do some really interesting things with the product. Yeah, that's the main gate at this point, is just making sure that regulators are comfortable with the Reg BI rules.
Yeah. wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about a whole another vector that's new, banking, and even getting into mortgages. Talk about where you are right now. It's obviously a recent rollout, but some of the KPIs of how that's going, and then what does success look like over the next 12– 24 months? I appreciate you're kinda slow rolling into it, to not stub your toe, but, like, talk about the progression, the adoption, what you're seeing in momentum. Is that affecting new deposits? Where are we right now?
Yeah. We love banking, the momentum we're seeing. You wanna be the financial super app, you have to be able to do everything. You have to be able to trade, invest, spend, save. You can see us kinda building the pieces together. We already had the Robinhood credit card , great adoption. We said we've seen over 600,000 customers. We just announced banking. You know, we said on the earnings call that it was over $400 million deposits, about a 50% direct deposit rate. The earnings call was less than a month ago, and we've already approximately doubled our assets for the banking since then.
Again, really, really strong adoption there. The nice part about banking is it can roll out much faster than the credit card. The credit card, structurally, you have to be a little careful when you roll it out. You have to make sure that the underwriting is there and the unit economics are positive. Banking is just like any of our other products. We roll it out, we get some customer feedback, we keep doing that. That one, you're gonna see us accelerate much faster in seeing the growth there. Big picture, when we talked to our customers before we announced it, they already said, "Hey, I bank with Robinhood."
That was their mental model, even though we weren't a bank, and they had a brokerage account, and this just makes it even simpler. What is the North Star goal? Any financial transaction, anything you want to custody, you should be able to do it in the app. This is just another way to do that now that you have the checking and the savings and continue to growing it out. Yeah, we really like the early adoption there.
I do think in a lower rate environment or if you get some volatility in the markets, banking is a really nice natural hedge against the transaction products, and it'll be another way for customers to engage to us, even if they don't wanna be trading or doing something like that. Yeah, we're really excited, and I think it'll be a stronger driver of net deposit growth in the near term.
Yeah. Like, as you think about scaling it and the sequencing of that, like, when do you kinda let the governors off a little bit and let the floodgates really open? 'Cause it seems like obviously you wanna manage it and not, again, go too fast. Like, where are we on that, and is that more of like 2026 is a learning year and 2027's where you really let it loose? Or how do we think about that in terms of full customer and pushing it more to customers to let them know?
Yeah. No, I think the 2026 is gonna be the year.
Yeah.
Banking, I think there's no structural reason it's going to take multiple years like the credit card. This should be the year where it gets out, and it's open. Again, right now we're doing it like we do any other software product, but there's nothing structural that'll hold it. I think 2026 will be a big year for that. Even on the credit card, I know you still see people say, "Hey, I'm on the wait list," and doing this.
Yeah.
We're over half a million customers today, the wait list is still pretty solid, we are really loving what we're seeing on the cohorts, on the unit economics, on anything around the credit metrics. We're starting to scale the credit card a little bit faster, as you've seen from the prior few quarters as well. Both of those should have a pretty big 2026, hopefully.
Yeah. In terms of just managing we actually, we didn't even hit— I wanna just maybe put 60 seconds on TradePMR. The RIA custody. It's another $8 trillion TAM. You pick your— in that zip code, and you guys obviously have a nice business there. Been a little bit quieter in terms of like hearing about it from the outside. Are you gonna do a lot more on that front this year, and what should we expect there?
Yeah. We hope this is a big year for it. We purchased it last year. We're in the digestion mode, integrating, all that good stuff. Now you can get back to product velocity. Actually today, the platform is putting out a blog post that we are beta testing our referral network. That was the main thesis, that the RIAs would like to have access to customers who can then match them together for what they want, and Robinhood customers would really like advice. You can build a really interesting referral network there.
This already exists in some of our competitors, but what we hear is they actually compete with their own IRAs 'cause they also have their own business. Well, we don't. We think there's a really nice way to have it super simple, intuitive to go into the app and say, "This is the advisor I would like, this is the demographics," and match them together. Conversely, the advisors can come in and so that's in test mode right now. We just announced the first four RAs that are in there. Employees are testing it, and you should expect to see more coming out of that later this year.
That's one we're super excited about there. It's also a place over time, you mentioned AI, where that's another powerful place to do that. Again, we haven't announced anything there, but if you think about the vectors of where you can invest in AI, that's one. Yeah, I think you're gonna see us investing more in the business. That platform has their own conference in the middle of the year called SYNERGY, and so we'll have some more product news to share there. Super excited to see the referral network out in the wild.
Great. And kinda the last minute here, Shiv, like we just hit a lot of products, a lot of growth areas. At the same time, you gotta manage expenses and, you know, buck stops with you there. How do you keep control on the expense base with— I'm sure everybody within the firm wants more money? Talk about the balance there and how you think about expenses and the trajectory?
Yeah, great question. This is what I've been doing for the better part of eight years, so very, very happy to continue doing this. I think there's two North Stars we look for. One is we are a growth company. We need to be growing, every year we're gonna keep investing for growth across the three arcs, and you can judge that on the 20% net deposits annualized. It's a good way to do it. P rofitable growth, I know I keep saying that over and over again. That's how you maintain focus. That's how you maintain discipline, that's the part that kind of is the check metric there.
The other thing is we have about 85% fixed costs, if something were to happen or the market environment change, we have a lot of discretion across headcount and marketing dollars. I don't wanna oversteer, we're gonna make sure we're investing, but if anything were to change, we can do that. The last thing, you know, I'll say it over and over again, what are we optimizing for for shareholders? Earnings per share, free cash flow per share over time. That's how you should judge us. That's what we're focused on. If you keep focusing on the inputs and the customers, those output metrics will take care of themselves.
Yeah. That's great. Well, doesn't feel like a digestion year, so I think we figured that piece out. Shiv, thank you for doing this. We went through a lot and always just great to catch up and see you, so thanks for coming in. Thank you everyone for joining us today for Robinhood.
No, thank you. Appreciate it.
Awesome. Thank you, sir.