Robinhood CEO Tenev: The company aims to use trading as a customer acquisition engine and provide users with lifetime wealth management

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stated on CNBC that the company aims to use trading as a customer acquisition engine and then provide users with lifetime wealth management. He referred to active traders as the "engine room" and foundation of the business: stocks, crypto, and prediction markets draw people in, which then leads to retirement accounts and financial advice.

As of the end of June, there were approximately 28 million funded accounts, a year-on-year increase of 7%; average revenue per user rose 24% year-on-year. Tenev noted that customer sources are not singular, with prediction markets, stocks, and crypto all feeding into the funnel, and a high percentage of users opening retirement accounts and adding products after joining the platform. He also mentioned that traditional high-net-worth services need to reach a broader customer base and be delivered at lower prices.

Capability expansion is following three lines. The managed investment product Robinhood Strategies allows users to have their accounts managed by the system, with users able to open up to about 10 managed portfolios; banking services offer checking, savings, debit cards, and multi-currency payments to Gold members, with deposits exceeding approximately $1.5 billion; the Gold credit card has over 700,000 cardholders with annual spending exceeding $10 billion. The managed assets in retirement accounts were reported to be about $26.5 billion with approximately 1.8 million funded accounts as of 2025.

The advisory side is being supplemented through acquisitions. In November 2024, it was announced that Robinhood would acquire TradePMR for about $300 million in cash and stock, with the deal closing in February 2025; the platform serves registered investment advisors and managed or held assets exceeding $40 billion at the time of acquisition, which reported approximately $50 billion by the second quarter of 2026. This year, an advisor network was launched to refer users with investable assets of at least $250,000 to advisors custodied at TradePMR, including firms like Grimes & Company and The Mather Group. Revenue for the second quarter was approximately $1.31 billion, with net inflows of about $21.7 billion.

Tenev identified the intergenerational wealth transfer of over $100 trillion in the coming decades as a target market, stating that as users become wealthier, their needs will extend to trusts, estate planning, private wealth, and private banking. In investor communications, he positioned Robinhood as a comprehensive account covering taxable accounts, multiple asset classes, managed portfolios, and real advisors. He summarized the challenge in one sentence: how to sell high-net-worth quality products at mass-market prices to a broader audience.

Who is buying and who is selling: buying is equity capital from payment order flow, subscriptions, net interest, and advisor referral fees, while selling is the free trading experience. The event-driven nature comes from intergenerational asset turnover and the aging of users, with funds shifting from high-frequency trading commissions to custodial fees, credit card cycles, and bank interest rate spreads. The beneficiaries are Robinhood, which can convert trading users into custodial and advisory relationships, while the pressured parties are pure brokerage firms that only serve as channels and cannot retain balances, as well as traditional wealth institutions that filter clients based on traditional thresholds.

In public figures, TradePMR's $50 billion is still far smaller than Schwab and Fidelity; the advisor network's threshold of $250,000 indicates that the top of the funnel has been separately cut off. There are no new holdings disclosed on-chain or at the exchange side, with incremental growth mainly recorded in account numbers, average user revenue, and managed assets.

Source: Public information