Robinhood’s chief brokerage officer and the head of its TradePMR custodian, which it signed a deal to acquire in late 2024, told an audience of advisors at Wealth Management EDGE that they are positioning the firm to serve the once-young investors that made Robinhood a household name as they age into needing more complex financial advice.
“A lot of the customers that came to Robinhood early on were very young, and so their financial needs were quite limited,” Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer, told the audience of about 1,600 attendees, including 1,000 financial advisors at The Boca Raton resort in Boca Raton, Fla. “Those kids have grown up. They’re now an average age of 35.”
The relationship with TradePMR, he said, will give those clients, and Robinhood, a way to sync them with financial advisors to manage their adult lives, which may include houses, kids and larger portfolios.
“They’re not comfortable managing all of that,” he said. “They’re looking for advised solutions, and they’ve been loud and clear in telling us you don’t have them.”
Davis Janowski, senior editor, technology and research analyst at WealthManagement.com, noted that Robinhood’s initial popularity emerged from its no-cost brokerage option, which disrupted the investing space. He asked how the firm was now looking to reshape the “tradition-bound advisor space, especially for those emerging generations.”
Robb Baldwin, president and CEO of TradePMR, said the combination of firms will help them to jump ahead of the rest of the custodial space in terms of technology and user experience.
“The truth of the matter is, when you look around the landscape of the financial industry, we are way behind,” he said. “There’s just not a lot of modern technology stacks … as you know, it’s all still baked onto these old, antiquated systems, old mainframes and there’s only about five of those that exist in the U.S., period.”
He said the deal set “the tone for what we feel like the next generation of advisors needs to grow their business, especially to serve the next generation that’s coming around the corner.”
Quirk added that many of Robinhood’s 26 million-person investor base are likely to be the recipients of a large transfer of wealth from prior generations, and the systems they use to manage that wealth will need to look more like the tech-forward solutions they grew up on.
“They’re not going to be looking for the solutions that exist today,” he said. “They’re going to be looking for the solutions that they are accustomed to.”
Jankowski also asked the pair what the first offerings or products would be on their road map from the relatively new deal.
Quirk said a key focus area was the custodial referral program for advisors, which he called a “storefront” for advisors to connect with next-generation clients entering their prime earning years.
“It’s just an awesome opportunity to create that connection (with advisors) and make sure that they know the avenues available to them from an advisor standpoint,” he said.
He said Robinhood is speaking with advisors about what they like or don’t like from their current referral programs.
“We have a blank canvas,” he said. “We can do anything we want.”
Jankowski also asked the pair about a recent announcement that Robinhood would provide technology and capital for a government program called Invest America, which would give every child born in America $1,000 in a brokerage account.
Quirk said Robinhood already has a mocked-up application for the program. He sees it as a program for investing and giving financial advice.
“The educational component that we’re going to be able to do with the next generation is huge,” Baldwin added. “If you have $1,000 in an account that you’re able to look at on your app every day, and you know what’s going on with it … make you kind of curious about investing and adding money and seeing what that could look like.”
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