think that with the last session of the day, I'm very pleased to have Robinhood. From Robinhood, we have CFO, Shiv Verma. Shiv, you've been to the conference before, but this is the first time presenting, so welcome to the SDC, and thank you very much for the time.
No, thanks for having me. Excited.
Good stuff. Maybe we'll just start with some news that you guys announced today around agentic trading and some agentic commerce. Give a sense of exactly what was announced, how you think about the potential opportunity, and any differentiation in the product versus what's out there today.
Yeah. We're super excited to share it and we're glad we're able to get out in front of the conference so we can talk about it. We teased at the last earnings call that we're going to have a series of agentic products coming out throughout the year, and today we announced our first two. To your question, what did we announce? The first one is agentic trading, and the second is agentic commerce. What did we build? On the agentic trading side, it's just an MCP. Everyone in here, if you use Claude Code or Codex or your favorite LLM, you can have an MCP that connects directly to Robinhood. You create a separate agentic account.
On my phone today, I have my brokerage account, I have retirement, I have my joint account with my wife, and now I have a custodial account for my kid, and I have an agentic trading account. You fund it with whatever you'd like, and then you just go. I was telling Christian before we started, what are people doing? Wide gamut. It can be the simplest from, "I know I want to buy Apple. Go execute the trade for me." We're seeing people do research. "Show me stocks that are growing 20% per year, compounding with EPS positive, and show me a list of screeners." We're seeing some people say, "Create a portfolio for me. This is my risk preferences.
This is what I like." We had someone internally who said, "Go through 13Fs of these particular fund managers and see if you can create me a portfolio there." The sky's the limit. It's really fun to see what's being built. This is just our first one. This is for AI native or developers. This is people who are already techno-focused, who already use AI. This is not in the app. You have to actually physically connect through the MCP. Later on this year, you should expect that we will continue to have more features that are more for the novice investor. This is more for those that are there. The second thing we announced was agentic commerce.
Yep.
We have a credit card platform today, very similar in that you create a virtual card. In the Robinhood banking app, you can create a virtual card already. People use it all the time if they're traveling abroad or if they have one-time purchases. You can create a specific limit. You can say, "I want it to be $1,000 on this card," and then you give it to your agent and you say, "Go." What have we seen people do? Some examples I'll give you is if you're a sneakerhead and you say, "Hey, the next time these sneakers drop, go purchase them for me." We've seen people use it for restaurant reservations. "This is my favorite restaurant in New York. They're always booked. Monitor the site. When something opens up, go book it for me." People have used it to price compare.
This is a coat that I like. Go to Amazon and Walmart. Tell me which one is cheaper. As soon as it goes below $100, go buy it. Again, these are for people that are AI native. They already have the tooling, and they're starting to connect to the MCPs. Throughout the rest of the year, we have a couple product events. Next week, we have our RIA conference, Synergy. You should expect we'll have some more product announcements there. In July, we have our U.K. event. Again, you should expect some more products there. In the fall, we typically have our active trader event. Throughout the year, you're going to see us drop more of these. Agents are a buzzword right now. What does it mean for us? It just means you're solving a customer pain point. That's all it is.
You abstract away some of the nonsense they want to do. The Collison brothers have a great framework they use for agentic commerce. Everybody goes to the logical end state of the agent's going to go buy me everything. When you talk to customers, the first thing they want to do is, "I know what I want to buy, I just want you to go fill out the web form." Trading is the same thing. Everyone's going to the logical end state. My agent's going to do everything for me. When we talk to our customers, most of them know what they want to buy, or they know a sector, or they just need some help. There is some group of customers who say, "Just take over my portfolio," but you have to build for everybody, and you have to get them along the way.
That's why we started there. The last thing I'll add is the reason we did payments and investments is we think it's really important to have agents across the entire Robinhood ecosystem. We group these ones together throughout everything from brokerage, to advice, to payments, to international. There's a lot of different ways you can use agents, so you should start to see us with more and more of these products throughout the year.
Okay, that's awesome. Let's stick with that theme and talk about the advice space.
That's probably the biggest part of revenue and wealth management. There's always been regulatory constraints, et cetera. You can announce a product if you want to now, but if you can't, give us a sense of what a product will look like in terms of getting rid of that regulatory issue, and how you can differentiate.
The way we think about it is, wherever the customer is on their journey, you want to be able to meet them. If you're fully self-directed, you want to do everything yourself, what we did today, the MCP is for you. If you want a little bit of help, that's our strategies product. I know what I should do, I should be in the market, you help me. That's the strategies with an active overlay. The last end of the spectrum is, I know I want to be in markets, I don't know what to do. Please help. That's a human. Everywhere along the way, you want to be able to do that. With the product we did today, this is fully Reg BI. This is not advice. This is not under an RIA. The differentiation is you have to take intent.
You can tell the agent what you want to do. If anyone in here uses Claude Code, you go through it, you give it instructions. There's a lot of things it can do, if there's certain things that needs to take an intent, it asks for your permission. This is the same concept. You, the user, are taking an action. On the advice space, where do I think that's going? The end user in advice is not the customer, it's the RIA. If you make it really easy for the RIA, that's powerful for them. When we talk to our RIAs, we have an RIA custodian, it has about $40 billion of assets, hundreds of thousands of advisers. What they want to spend their time doing is talking to customers, meeting their clients. More sales-focused or relationship-driven.
They don't want to do the back office stuff, which is most of what they spend their time on. If you could have agents help them in a regulated way, that is really powerful. I wouldn't say it's as simple as I get asked, "Are agents going to disrupt advisors? You're not going to have them." We actually think there's room for both, because when we talk to customers, some people want to do it themselves. Some still want a human. If you want a human, let's go make their life easier, which then they can in turn serve the customers more.
Okay. Just talk about maybe the broader sort of AI strategy. You've been very specific with some numbers and around cost savings, I think nine figures in 2025, very significant benefits in the customer service side. Just talk to what you're doing that's different from peers. Why are you seeing so much productivity benefits so early?
Yeah, it's a great question. Internally, we have kind of two work stream. One is, what do we do for employees, and what are we doing for customers? If we start with the employee side, where do we start? Customer service, software development. That's the easiest piece. A couple data points we've shared, about 75% of our tickets are answered through AI. As you mentioned, over nine figures of software development savings. The more powerful thing is our commit velocity. What I shared on earnings is our commit velocity, a measure of how much code we produce, is up 50% since the start of last year, which was up even the year before. That has a secret sauce of Robinhood. You're constantly shipping, you're constantly doing more. It's not by accident. It starts with some of these AI toolings, and it starts with training.
It starts to make sure you are using the most frontier model as soon as they come out. When ChatGPT Enterprise came out in 2022, Vlad was on the phone with Sam the first weekend. We were an early adopter. Same when Opus 4.7 came out. You have to constantly be training your employees. Where are we focused on now? We are making sure that not just developers, but everybody internally has these tools. It's no longer optional to use Claude Code or Codex or your favorite LLM, but you also have to train people. We started with developers, now we're going to non-developers. I'll give you example that I like to use on the marketing side. We challenged the marketing team, can you build an ad entirely using AI, no humans involved?
From the Figma designs to actually creating the video using avatar actors, using ElevenLabs for the voice, to the post-production, to actually putting it out to the different channels we put it on, start to finish took about four hours. That usually after many tweaking and rounds would take two to three weeks to do that. We asked them, can you create 10 versions of this and A/B test it and see which one resonates with customers? They did that. We said, can you create another 10 versions of each one? Now you have 100 versions of the original ad. All that was done in a single afternoon. It really comes from do you give people the tools? Do you give them the training? It has to come from the top. Why do I think we're succeeding? One, we've been early.
Two, we are an engineering culture. We are a technology company that happens to be in financial services. Our engineers are Silicon Valley-based. Vlad is an engineer by training, it starts from the whole thing. You have to make sure that you're giving people the tools from day one. Another thing that's really popular right now is harnesses. What is a harness? It's just a way to make it easier for your employees to interact with all of these different tools. We built our own internal harness. Now, if I want to go create an agent, I can interact with that, and it will abstract everything else in the back and everything I need to log into Okta, all the different security profiles, and I can just go. That is really powerful.
As you do that, you can ship faster, you can deliver more products, then you can pass on more value to the customers. It kind of creates that same cycle. Yeah, it's been something we've been fully focused on for basically the past four years. What changed was when Opus 4.7 came out in December. That's the logarithmic change point. Codex is very close now. They go neck and neck depending where they are. These models are getting to the point that if you're not using them, you're going to be at a disadvantage versus your peers.
Okay. Let's just step back a little bit on the broader business.
$300 billion in platform assets.
Yeah.
Impressive, but pretty minuscule relative to the size of the U.S. wealth market, which is over $70 trillion. What's the path to more meaningful wallet share over time?
Yeah. About $350 billion today, actually. Point well taken. We love where we're at. We're only about 10 years old. To your point, U.S. discretionary brokerage accounts, about $20 trillion today. Retirement accounts in the U.S., about another $20 trillion. Financial advice, about $7 trillion-$10 trillion. That doesn't even include banking or the adjacent field. While we love $350, we have a long way to go, and our competitors have shown you can get to tens of trillions of assets. There's no structural reason. How do we do that? Kind of two things. One, you gain wallet share with your existing customers. Two, you compound with new customers. With our existing customers, when you look at our cohort charts, there's two things I obsess over. Where are they starting? How does it slope and how does it asymptote?
Everything we see is our customers are starting with larger balances. Our average account size today is about $12,000. When I joined, that was closer to $2,000. They're asymptoting later, meaning they're depositing more and more. That's really healthy. Why is that happening? That's the more fun part. It's because we're building the products that we didn't have before. Who is our prototypical customer today? I've shared this with some other folks in the room, so apologies if you've heard this before. Our median customer today is 36. They tend to be educated, some extra discretionary income relative to national average, widely distributed across the U.S. They tend to be married, one to two kids, or a cat or a dog. You need to build for them. When I joined, the average customer age was 28. Now they're 36.
What do they want today? They wanted custodial accounts. We didn't have those before. Trust accounts, we said that's coming out very soon. They want mortgages. They want banking accounts, checking and savings. As you round out the feature set, that's how you grow the net deposits. That's how you get into the $1 trillion. The second thing we're focused on is the new customers. I shared at the last earnings call, we're going to start spending a little bit more of our resources on top-of-funnel growth. In 2022, we switched to completely focusing on net deposits and Gold subscribers. We had acquired a large customer base, more than 20 million, but we had a really small wallet share. Everything we did was focused on that. We still believe we can compound 20% per year on net deposits. That's the goal, and that's not changing.
We're turning the dial a little bit more on top-of-funnel growth, which will also help the net deposits compound.
Okay, can you talk more about that?
Yeah.
I love net deposits. It's my favorite metric.
Yeah.
You guys are growing 5x your peers.
How do you get account growth, which has lagged a little bit, to move up?
Yeah. Excellent question. Organic account growth is roughly seven to 10 per tier right now. We've spent $0 marketing dollars on it, and we have spent very little product side on it. What are the different vectors you can do? The first thing is products. We're starting with products that can get customers who are younger and in different phases of life. I mentioned custodial accounts. Another one is Trump accounts. It came out that we are the sole custodian on that. There is news today that it's actually coming out tomorrow, and over five million people have already signed up. That's a great way to get your technology in front of people very early on. Banking.
Banking is a great product because when you talk to Gen Z or 18 to 22-year-olds, many of them actually start with a bank account before an investment account. If you think about the 18-year-old, you go to college, what's the first thing you do? I need a checking account, I need a savings account, I need a credit card. We actually decoupled the banking product from the main app so customers can onboard that way as well. International, that's another vector. The last number we shared is we had a little under 1 million funded customers overseas. Small relative to the 27 million customer base, but that's a vector there. The last lever we have is we're starting to turn some of our marketing promotion dollars to that. We pivoted entirely to net deposits and Gold subs. That's not changing.
I would just view it as a dial. If we can get the same LTVs and the same ROIs that we underwrite to, but put a little bit more towards NFA growth, we think that'll compound in the longer term. Those are some of the levers that we're focused on.
Maybe talk about your Gold accounts a little bit more. There's the subscribers, something like 50%, 60% penetration.
I would argue maybe your most loyal customer base. Talk through the ceiling for that sort of product and how much penetration you can get there, and any sort of products or features over the next couple of years that could drive better penetration.
Yeah. As you mentioned, Gold. In 2023, we made a strategic shift to really focus on Gold. The vision was everything should be better with Gold on Robinhood. The first product we built was the high yield savings account. That's when interest rates were high, you were getting 4% to 5% interest rate. We took a risk. We said, "Hypothesis, we're going to gate it," really resonated with customers. Today that product is $30 billion roughly in sweeps deposits. Now what you're seeing is every new product that we build, we're saying, "Is there something better with Gold?" You go across all three of our arcs. In the active trader arc, if you're a index options trader or futures trader, you have better commissions with Gold. In the wallet share arc, if you're a saver, you get the high yield savings account rate.
If you're a strategies customer, you don't pay any fees after $100,000 in assets. You keep adding more products in there. About 40%-50% of new customers sign up for Gold. While it's a 15% total attach rate, that's because we had a very large base at start. We're now getting customers earlier in their journey. If you think about the prototypical customer journey, I come to Robinhood to do something. I want to trade my first equity, my retirement account, I want a bank account, I want a credit card. You discover Gold. Wow, it's $5 a month, there's all of these great features. You sign up for Gold, you use other products. We don't view it as a subscription product, we view it more as a loyalty product.
When customers are on it, they tend to deposit five times more on average, and they tend to use more products than non-Gold members. That's a little bit of the thesis behind it. Where do we think we can go? Everyone uses Amazon Prime, that's the canonical subscription model. The ones that I really look to are the consumer mobile subscriptions that have done really well. Uber One, Spotify, DoorDash. They have shown that you can get tens of millions of consumer subscribers in a mobile product app, and so we're roughly four and a half million subscribers today and continuing to grow. There's no structural ceiling why you can't have more, but you have to have good products in there. The other question I get asked a lot is, "Are you ever going to change the pricing?" It's $5 a month, $50 a year.
We like to say it's the best deal in financial services. We are not allergic to raising pricing, and we've experimented, but we want to make sure that it grows, and it has a lot of value before we do that. The mental model we use internally is akin to Costco. Costco rarely raises their rates, but they do. It doesn't happen very often. When they do it, nobody complains because they're getting so much value and it's so much there. There will be a point where the value will be so rapid that we're more comfortable doing that. For today, we're really focused on just adding more products to it.
Perfect. Let's talk about some near-term trends. A lot of discussion on the second quarter call around take rates in crypto and options. Just talk through what happened.
in 1Q, April and May, what trends are you seeing, and then maybe how investors think about pricing dynamics in your business over time?
Yeah. Great question. On last earnings, we shared that crypto, for example, the take rate was down. That was mainly due to the mix shift of traders. If you look at our pricing model in crypto, it's tiered pricing. The more you trade, the lower your commission, all the way down to $0.03 for the most active trader. For the casual trader, it was 85 basis points, now it's more recently 95. What we are seeing in Q1 and what's starting in April and May is very similar. The casual trader has stepped away, the active trader and the institutional trader are still there. They tend to be active throughout market cycles. During these periods of lower volatility or crypto winter, you tend to see less casual. That hasn't really changed.
I shared on the earnings call that relative to Q1, April was down about seven, eight basis points on a take rate for quarter to date, roughly at the same spot as where we are today. Starting to stabilize, maybe slight improvements, especially with the 95 rates, but I think roughly that 7-8 basis points is still where we are. On the options side, a little bit different. Options and equities volumes are really healthy. April we shared was our second highest trading month ever. May is off to a very good start. The reason the take rate came down was the mix shift of assets. We went from more single name stocks to ETFs. ETFs have lower spreads, the take rate you get there is more.
Has nothing to do with volumes or the type of traders, just which asset class they're choosing to see. What we're seeing right now quarter to date is that the take rate is roughly where we were in Q1. It's stabilized, it's come back up. As I said in the Q1 earnings call, it had ticked down a little bit. Now with April and May volumes, it's starting to come back up. For that, we still feel really good there. In general, take rate's an output metric. What we focus the team on is market share. They are gold on market share and profits. Wherever the take rate goes, it's going to go. Crypto is a great example. The counterfactual is if we didn't have the tiered pricing, we would've lost market share, and we saw that in prior winters.
When crypto winter started and the active traders stayed, but they're more price sensitive, they went away to other platforms. That didn't happen this time. They were still engaged in Robinhood. The other thing that changed is we didn't have an institutional platform before. Now we have Bitstamp, the exchange. They tend to be more active during these periods of lower volatility. That's why even though the take rate came down, from our standpoint, that's okay. That's an output metric. If we keep building and market share is holding steady or growing, which is what we're seeing on crypto, that's really what we're focused on. On the brokerage side, as I mentioned, volumes are really healthy and the market share continues to grow.
On the crypto side, how do you think about long-term pricing? I guess there's this tension. Some of the newer plays that have come in, like E*TRADE, et cetera, have been quite low. Crypto native players are still quite high.
How do you think about just the intermediate term in terms of crypto pricing?
Yeah. The way we thought about it when we redesigned our pricing is you need to have the best pricing for every type of trader. Before, when we were at 75 or 85 basis points, we were kind of a tweener. For the most active traders, actually, our pricing wasn't that competitive. For the more casual trader, we were probably under-monetizing. Now what we did is we went across every tier, and we said, for that particular segment of trader, we still want to be the best in the market, but we need to go lower for the active traders, and we need to monetize a little bit more on the casual trader. What we're seeing is that's generally working well. We're still tinkering with it.
We actually just raised the pricing a little bit on the highest tier, and it went from 85 to 95 basis points a few days ago. Pricing is one component of why customers come to the platform. It's great that our other peers have finally caught up and realized this is a real asset class. We welcome that. They have two or three coins they may be listing. What do customers want? They want selection. We also have staking. We have a non-custodial wallet. They want all the features in one place. Pricing one size fits all, I don't think is exactly what people are looking for. We've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Again, we're open to experimenting, but where we are today with the tiered pricing, I think is working well for active traders.
Even for the casual trader, it's still the best deal out there. That's really what we're trying to solve for.
Okay. On net interest income and securities lending, that obviously also took up some pressure in the first quarter. Feels like the environment is better. Looks like rates are going to be high for longer. Seems like there's a big IPO pipeline coming through that should help sec lending. Maybe your views on how you think through that revenue line over the next year or so.
What do we do? We focus on the inputs. All the inputs that I'm looking at look very healthy. If I look across the different areas of NIM, margin book, $18 billion plus, highest it's ever been. Our sweeps program, still around $30 billion, continuing to do well. Securities lending, the input metrics are how many people are opting in and how much AUC is opted in. I think the last numbers we shared were about 25% of customers and 50% of assets were opted in. Very healthy rates there, continuing to grow. What is lower? It's the specials, the rebates rate. The reason for that is IPOs are lower, and volatility was lower in that particular asset class. If IPOs come back, I think that's a nice tailwind to the business. Why is that helpful for sec lending?
When you think about what securities lending is, what are the names people want to borrow? It's names with high volatility and low flow, and when there tends to be a directional thesis. That is the prototypical IPO. It comes out with a lot of volatility and will move around, and people have different views, and it's a very low flow. As that comes up, that tends to drive a lot of the specials rebate rate. If that comes back up, that's a nice coiled spring for us because the rest of the inputs are there. It's nice to see that a lot of the mega-cap IPOs have either filed or are rumored to have filed, and so we'll see where that goes. Right now, balances are increasing, customers are opting into the program.
If rebate rates start to rebound, I think that'll be a nice win as well.
Okay, good stuff. If we talk to prediction markets.
pretty impressive growth from zero to $400 million in under two years. You are now launching Rothera. Talk through how you think about how that changes your competitive or strategic optionality in that business, and also from an economic perspective, how do you think about monetization?
As a reminder, Rothera is our joint venture with Susquehanna. What we did is we bought a DCM exchange. Today, previously, we were just the FCM, meaning we can onboard the customers, but we have to partner with a third-party exchange. We are now vertically integrated. The history of Robinhood is we usually partner for speed to market, and then we like to vertically integrate because you control the whole product and engineering, you also control the better economics. On Rothera specifically, a couple of things we're super excited about. First, it's going to launch very soon. We said it's going to be operational by mid this year. I don't want to steal the product team's thunder, but it is getting close, and so we'll be able to share that.
When we do that, there is no reason in the fullness of time that most of our flow should go through our own exchange. Doesn't mean we won't have a backup exchange or someone else there, but you should expect in the near to medium term that we migrate our flow over there. You control the product and engineering experience, which means you can launch faster. You also control the monetization. The way it works today is the customer pays $0.02 per contract. $0.01 goes to Robinhood, $0.01 goes to the exchange. When you control the entire piece, there's a lot of things you can do. We spent a lot of time thinking about it, and what you should see when the product comes out is. We are going to make sure that customers have the best pricing in the market.
We're going to take some of the monetization that we made, we're not going to hurt our take rate, but we're going to take most of the value and pass it on to customers, and that's going to allow us to have the best pricing in the market. We are also exploring what the pricing structure should look like. You should expect that the $0.02 per contract is not going to stay, that we're going to come out with a more innovative pricing that makes sure to address some of the customer pain points and will also be one of the best pricing on the market. That's the part that's coming soon.
Again, it should be out in the very near term, but we're going to use that extra monetization to redo the pricing model and to also make sure we can pass on a lot more back to the customer.
Okay. What's the next frontier for that market, for prediction markets? Obviously, it's mostly sports and politics today.
What are you hearing from your customers in terms of what sort of products they want and what's the restrictions or holdbacks in launching those?
Yeah. Great question. What are we focused on and where do we think it's going? Today, there's no doubt sports has found product market fit. If you look at NFA data or any of the exchanges, it's about 85% of most of the volumes. When I look overseas, take Polymarket for example, actually most of their volume is non-sports. It's definitely possible, and we've seen product market fit overseas. What do we focus on? First, just building a better product. If you look at our app relative to where it was 18 months ago when it came out, every week it's getting better and better. We're making the product more intuitive to design. That's a big change. We're adding new assets. We have about 2,000 to 3,000 contracts in the app today. A lot more than last year. Still lower than our competitors.
We don't list everything. We have a couple constraints. We want to make sure it has good liquidity. If it doesn't have good liquidity and customers won't be able to get out, we don't think it's suitable. We also don't list war contracts, death contracts, things like that. In general, we stand for access and we want to list more and more contracts. The fun part is we're starting to see use cases that we didn't even imagine. I've given a couple of these examples before, but I think it's fun to share. During travel season, we noticed a lot of people were trading weather contracts, and we asked and talked to customers, "What were you doing?" They were hedging their flight risk. They were worried if their flights would get canceled.
They said, "At least I'll have a good trade in my event contract." In certain parts of the country, people were trading contracts to hedge their insurance. In a high hurricane season in Florida, for example, we saw some customers supplementing their insurance by buying event contract. These are use cases we didn't even think about. As we look forward and more of these organic use cases come up, we think this is going to be a larger and larger piece of the platform. The other piece we're super excited about is how do you interact it with traditional brokerage.
Yeah.
The advantage we have to some of our peers is we have all of your asset classes in one place. Equities, for example. You go to the stock detail page for Apple, you can trade Apple the equity, you could put an event contract on the KPIs, how many iPhone they're going to trade. You could do an event contract on their actual earnings, the revenue, and EPS. Today, some of our competitors have that. We will list that as soon as we can. The only thing we're waiting for is regulatory clarity. It's unclear if KPIs and financial contracts are a SEC security swap or if they're a CFTC event contract. The SEC and the CFTC are working together, and I think they'll get that sorted out pretty soon. As soon as we have that, we'll do that there.
When I look around, it's fantastic that sports has found product market fit. At earnings, we shared over 1 million customers have used event contracts. The most recent number is actually 1.5 million customers have now used event contracts, so it's continuing to find more traction there. We're also seeing some of these non-sports use cases around financials or weather or other things like that. The last piece I'll add where it's going is today it's a U.S. retail product. With the exchange, it can become an institutional product. We're already getting inbounds from other FCMs saying, "Hey, can we use your exchange? We don't want to use the existing third parties out there. We want to migrate off of them." It can also become an international product.
We're talking to other jurisdictions where we already have licenses throughout the world to see if we can offer that as well. They're constructive. I think they'll get there. If I look out in the future, it's great that sports found product market fit, but I think it'll be more assets, it'll be institutional, and it'll be global, and we'll find use cases that we hadn't even thought about before.
Okay. Very helpful. Let's look at some of the new products. One is Nian, Diaz, you hired private markets.
which you've done a lot of work around. Maybe just talk through your offering today. I think you have a fund, maybe one or two.
I think maybe you're on two already. Talk through your vision for private markets, how you think about just long-term potential and the monetization model.
Yeah. I'm very passionate about the private markets and helped launch this. The vision is what we did for public markets, we should do for private markets. That's the start. The challenge that Vlad gave me was, he wants to be the biggest venture capital firm in the world. Over some time horizon, but we will get there. We started like we always do, we talked to customers. What were the main pain points of customers? First, they felt like the best technology companies in the world, they didn't have access to. They were staying private for longer, and it wasn't fair. They wanted daily liquidity. Unlike an institutional investor, they're used to that, and that's very important for them, even if it's private. Not all customers are accredited. That was a huge barrier.
85% of Americans aren't accredited. We needed to build a product that was for everybody, and they wanted competitive fees. If you look what we did, the first product we launched, Robinhood Ventures Fund I, that was in a closed-end fund format. We used the closed-end fund, 40 Act fund for a few different reasons. It's exchange listed. Anyone can buy it, just like an ETF. You don't need to be accredited. It has daily liquidity because it trades, and we did low fees, 2% with no carry. Very different than many VCs who would charge carry on that. The resonation has been great. We shared 150,000 customers participate in the IPO. The fund is now roughly a billion and a half market cap. We've been able to partner with some of the best-in-class names out there.
OpenAI was one we just announced, Stripe, Databricks, Ramp, the list goes on and on. When we think about it, that was Fund I. We said we confidentially filed with the SEC for Fund II, because we're on file confidentially, I can't share too much more than that, but you should expect that more coming. What we're looking at is all the different pain points. What is our vision? If you're an entrepreneur and you want to raise capital, you can do it from seed through IPO with Robinhood. You're raising your first venture round? Great. We have a platform to do that. You're doing your growth rounds? Great. You're pre-IPO? Ventures Fund I can invest in you. By the way, we can help take you public. We've done 50 IPOs on our platform.
After you go public, you can use Robinhood to talk to your shareholders. We have technology where you can ask questions. That's a little bit of the vision. That's how we did the private markets in the U.S. Overseas, we use tokenization. Tokenization, we have the MiFID licenses in Europe. We've tokenized public stock, we also did two private stocks over there. We think that's a very good infrastructure to do it in the non-U.S. In the U.S. side, until tokenization becomes legal, we're going to continue to focus on these '40 Act funds, because we think that's the best way to provide customers access to private assets.
Okay. Since you brought up Europe, let's go to international.
For the most part, it's been a U.S. story.
A very impressive one here. The brand is fairly global. There's always like a Robinhood of XYZ country.
Just talk to what you need to do to be more meaningful globally.
Yeah. It's a great question. Where are we today? We're in the U.K. We have a brokerage product there. We're in the E.U. with a crypto product and stock tokens. We have a couple pending acquisitions that are closed. Canada, we announced WonderFi's coming pretty soon. In Indonesia, we brought Buana a crypto and brokerage exchange. We announced from Singapore and the MAS, we got principal approval to go there. We're continuing to expand. What's my very simple model for how we expand overseas? I use a two by two matrix, brokerage and crypto on one axes, organic and inorganic on the other. If you look at those four boxes, we have used every single one for going into different places. For U.K., it was organic brokerage. For E.U., it was organic crypto.
For the other countries I mentioned, it was through M&A, either brokerage or crypto. We're indifferent to which way we get there. The reason we pick certain ones is we talk to customers, and we say, "Where do we have a right to win?" In the U.K., for example, we found out that customers wanted a good way to buy U.S. stocks at low cost. We started with that. In the EU, customers wanted another trusted platform to buy crypto at low fees. We started there. When you talk to customers today, they want the full product suite. The U.K. customers want crypto, the EU customers want brokerage, so we're going to build that out. These are just beachheads.
We get asked a lot, "Hey, you only have crypto here, you only have brokerage here." The mental model is you start a beachhead, you find product market fit, you find the first customers who love you and evangelize the brand, then you expand. That's something we've been working on. What do you need to expand? Because you're a software company, it's actually not that hard. The main restriction tends to be licenses and landing teams, and so that's why sometimes we use M&A. We have capital and distribution, but if we can buy a great landing team that has licenses or some product market fit or a small amount of assets, that's generally what we do. That's how our acquisitions have been. That should also help us accelerate. Yeah, it's a long journey.
This is why we put it in the five to 10-year arc. We started this a few years ago, and we're nearing 1 million customers today, and we're going to keep focusing on it.
Let's talk through competitive dynamics. I would say you guys have been very good at understanding that it needs to be multi-asset class. In every asset class, that's helped you grow quite a lot.
Your peers have realized that. Peers want to be very big. Peers have started to do the same thing.
They've gotten some traction on prediction markets. They want to do equities as well. How do you think about Robinhood maintaining its competitive advantages as folks essentially just copy your strategy?
Yeah. It's a good question. The way we think about it is we obsess about customers, but we make sure we're aware of what the competitors are doing. You can't ignore them. You have to benchmark and do intelligence. If you start with the customers, good thing happens. It is a feature and a bug that people copy you when you're successful. We've seen this for the design of the app. We've seen our features. How do you stay ahead? You keep innovating. You have to come out with some of these newer and newer products. Take fractional shares or 24/5. A few years ago, we were the first to do that. Now everyone has that. You have to keep pushing the boundaries. We talked about the agentic and MCPs earlier. Have to be the first to market there.
You have to keep innovating on there. The way you stay ahead of your peers is you just talk to customers for what they're looking for, and you keep doing that. We are not naive. This is a competitive space. Many people are coming for us. We like to say we're going to be the financial super app. We started saying that when we IPO'd five years ago. To be honest, we were still figuring it out. I think today we have a much better view of what customers want. They want all their assets in one place, and they want to be able for you to custody and do all their transactions in one place. If you keep rounding it out, that's how you win. I don't think it will be a winner take all.
Okay.
I do think it will be a few take most. Right now, I think we are one of the folks that have the right to win in the space, but there's a lot of people coming for everybody else. If we keep shipping for customers, if you listen to what they're doing, if you keep your product velocity high, I like our stance. The other thing that's different relative to some of our peers is we started with the asset side. It's much different to start with the asset side relative to the lending side. Customers trust you with your assets, they're depositing. It's very easy to give someone money. It's very hard to get it back. That's another advantage that we have. We started with something a little bit harder. Again, we're going into other people's space, they're coming into ours.
The only thing you can really do is just keep innovating, and then the rest will take care of itself.
Okay. Since you're CFO, can't help but ask a couple margin and capital-
Sure
related questions here. There's a lot going on at Robinhood, sometimes even hard for us to just keep track, like today, another new product. How do you think through investing for growth versus margin expansion? Because you've kind of done both fairly well.
just walk us through your thought process and how you think about that.
Yeah. Capital allocation is something I spend a lot of time on, as does Vlad, and we debate a lot of these things. Our mental model is we want to invest for growth. Anything that's extra we use for M&A to accelerate speed to market, extra, we return capital to shareholders. We're in the fortunate position where we can proverbially have our cake and eat it, too. We are investing in growth in a lot of different vectors, we've shared some of those, I've talked about those at earnings. We are also doing M&A. A lot of those M&As are done to get small lending teams or speed to market. We still have excess capital. We just announced a billion and a half share repurchase program to continue to return that there.
Across all three of our vectors we're doing this. To be really clear that we are a growth company. We're going to invest for growth, we're going to keep doing it, but the reason we're doing it profitable, you talked about margins, our check metric is profitable growth. Just meaning very simply, in every given year, we want revenue to grow faster than expenses. It won't be linear. There'll be some where it's a little bit less and some where it's a little bit more. We want to take the cash flows that we're growing every year and keep reinvesting in the business. I get asked all the time, "Hey, why don't you invest even more? You have so much to build, so many TAMs. Why don't you go more?" The reason we use profitable growth as a check metric is two reasons.
One, it produces financial discipline, and so it really makes you rationalize and make sure you're using your resources properly. Two, it's for the focus of the team. If you think about our model, we ship incredibly fast. We went to a GM model, so we decentralized all of our teams. We don't have a CPO or a CTO. We have GMs and engineers and product and ops compliance all report into them. They have to build for the core business.
They have to scale the products that launched, and then you have to plant new seeds for the future. In any given year, if a GM is planting more than two to three new seeds, they won't be able to do amazing products. It's the old Steve Jobs adage, you have to say no to a lot of good things so that you can ship great things. That's why we do that discipline. It's worked out pretty well for us. We don't set a margin target. We don't say this is where we expect margins to be. We look at each individual product. Every product has to be to an economic positive, it has to be written to a good ROI, and then we build it up.
You take the check metric of profitable growth, and that's kind of how you end up where we are today. The algorithm's working for us. The last thing I'll mention is, I am a big proponent of the denominator matters. Managing our SBC is something that we've been doing for a long time. We try to be best in class there. Last year we bought back all of our dilution. This year we're already ahead of that pace. Our North Star financial metric is growing free cash flow per share and earnings per share. I'm a fintech nerd and a history buff, as you know this, I've looked at many of the best companies in the world that have reached trillion dollar valuations. What are the two things they all have in common? They consistently grow EPS and free cash flow per share.
Those are some of the things that we think about as we're going into it. How do you invest for growth, but also making sure you're doing right by shareholders.
Okay. Just to follow up on the buyback point, you're right, a billion and a half buyback authorization and also a fairly sizable credit facility of north of $3 billion in March. A lot of balance sheet capacity. How are you thinking about maybe the pacing of share buybacks for this year?
Yeah. We're spinning off free cash flow. We're using it. We've done about $350 million to date. I think we said about $300 million on the Q1 earnings, so can update that a little bit to about $350. We said the $1.5 billion should be roughly two to three years, but we tend to be more opportunistic. We have a program where we just buy back our dilution. That kind of runs in the background. It's important to be in the market every day. We're also opportunistic during periods of market volatility. In Q1 when the markets were really volatile, we bought $250 million of our stock back in one quarter. We're not opposed to doing a little bit more.
When multiples get a little bit higher, we'll probably continue to buy back our dilution, but we'll pull back a little bit on that program. Again, we're in the fortunate position where you can do this, but if the markets stay volatile and we think we're more valuable than what we're getting credit for, we'll just go a little bit faster. The credit facility programs are just there for liquidity. We don't use them. We test them once a quarter, but they're nice to have if you ever have these periods of moment, but it's a nice, clean, simple balance sheet. I come from credit land in a prior lifetime. We have no leverage, about $6 billion of cash on the balance sheet, $3 billion-$4 billion of credit lines, and we like it that way. We're not opposed to it.
If there's an opportunity, whether it's through M&A or some way to get a cheap source of capital, we'll definitely explore that. Today we like our cash position and just having the revolving credit lines.
Okay, good stuff. Quickly on regulation.
Clearly it's been a 180, 360, I don't know what the word is, for regulatory shift under the new administration.
Yeah.
How do you think about maybe the big potential opportunities from things like the CLARITY Act or anything else on the regulatory landscape? Conversely, others as well have that tailwind. Are there some things that are also risks for you as we get clarity on regulation, no pun intended?
We like to build across different cycles, and different administrations. There's a couple things that I think are more obvious and ones we get asked about less. CLARITY Act, great. For us, we think it's important. Vlad has come out and said we support it, and we think it's actually trending well relative to where it was a few months ago, but it's not existential. We already have ways we can offer customers rewards, whether it's through a high yield sweep program or through a banking product. We'd love to be able to give customers rewards on their stable coins as well. If it goes through, fantastic. If not, again, it's not existential. The other one that we're focused on, we talked about tokenization. Today, we've told this to Chairman Atkins. The U.S. is behind. Europe already has regulation. We're building overseas, as are others.
We think it's really important for that to come back home. The SEC is making great progress. They've been really good partners on this, so have others, but that's one that we're focused on. Another one is the accreditation rules. We actually get asked about this less, Vlad and myself are actually very passionate about this, similar to private markets. The rules today are antiquated. They equivalent wealth with, are you able to invest in some of these assets? We think there should be other ways to make sure customers have the ability to do this through education or certification, think about options, how you have to go through certain requirements that should not be tied just to wealth. The administration has been receptive and feedback on there. Every way we look, we're hearing positive feedback. The other thing is on the use of technology.
The SEC and FINRA have actually been really good partners on this. This is new technology. It's uncharted ground. How are you going to deal with it? They're actually coming to us and say, "Hey, can you help us think about this?" As one of the largest players in the space and one of the technology leaders, and so we like working with them. Again, we're agnostic to what administration. This one has been more friendly to technology companies and financial services in particular, so that's great. In general, we think we can build across different cycles and different regulatory environments.
Okay. I have a bunch of questions here from the audience.
Yeah.
I'll just try and summarize them because we don't have a lot of time. Maybe one theme is, you've done a very good job on the trading side. Clearly a lot of product market fits, good ARRs in terms of some of the products. On the non-trading side, one could argue it's choppier.
Why do you think that is, and when do you think you will have non-trading products that are at least comparable in size to the trading side?
Yeah. If you look at our three pillars, active traders is the first pillar, we want to win there and you should goal us on market share. That's how you should judge success, today we're number one in options and getting very close on equities. On the non-trading side, we're continuing to compound pretty nicely. We shared at our last earnings that about 40% of our assets are what you would call more long-term, Retirement, ETFs, cash, and a few other items. Those products are more nascent. People forget Retirement has only been around for a couple of years, and it's already at $30 billion. Banking's been around for three months and it's at $2 billion. In the fullness of time, we're going to continue to round out this suite.
I think the reason active traders has more traction is it's just we've been at it longer, and we've been focused on it. We had the early customers there. What we've shown is if you build a great product, like banking, it took us five iterations to get here, but once you nail it, then you can scale it really fast. Those are the ones that get us most excited in that three to five-year arc.
Okay. There's the final one. As you think about revenues going forward, any way to think about your view on how growth will evolve between, say, uplift and more monetization.
per customer versus just growth in units or customers?
Yeah. I think the best way to look at revenue growth is a chart we have from the 2024 investor day, which is just correlated to assets on the platform. Why is net deposits our North Star? Net deposits is the measure of do our customers trust us? That correlates to higher assets, that correlates to higher revenue yield. How you get more net deposits could be both ways. It could be through new customers who start deposit, it could be through existing customers depositing more, it could be through launching new products, which pulls in new customers and gets you to deposit more. We're agnostic to how we get there. You need to do both.
If I think about our revenue model going forward, and if I was trying to model it out, I would just say, what do you think is going to happen to Assets Under Custody over time? As that's the best lever of what's going to happen to revenue growth as well.
Fantastic. With that, I think we'll call it a day. Thank you very much, Shiv.
No.
It was great.
Thanks for having me.