Robinhood Markets Inc. is a U.S. based company founded in 2013. The founders announce their mission to democratize access to the financial market. To fulfil its mission, the company is swiftly stealing commission charges from online brokerages from the rich, and giving access to the stock market to the poor. The Robinhood smartphone app allows individuals to invest in publicly traded companies listed on U.S. exchanges without paying a commission .
To sign up for the app, users must fill out an application. Once accepted, users are sent a brief video that explains the app, how to make trades and how they can get away with $0 trades.
How the company makes money:
Originally, Robinhood planned to make money off of order flow– a common tactic used by discount brokerages in the 1990s to generate revenue. Robinhood backpedaled on the idea because it executes orders through a clearing partner and, as a result, receives little to no payment for order flow. The company is willing to return to its original plan in the future if it receives order flows directly or begins to generate a lot of revenue from them.
For now, the app stays afloat for mainly two reasons. First, the business itself is extremely lean: no physical locations, a small staff, no massive public relations campaigns. Robinhood also generates interest off of unused cash deposits from user accounts according to the Federal Funds rate.
Second, venture capitalist such as Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Leverage, have invested more than $16 million in the app.
Some main features of the Robinhood product in addition to no commissions are account protection, secure and encrypted, fast execution by low-latency trading systems, real-time market data and smart notification.
How technology helps your investment: to describe the impacts of technology in stock market it is better to compare Robinhood with traditional players in the market. In fact, technology and competition has brought the cost of trading stocks for individual investors down to zero with the introduction of Robinhood. In addition, Robinhood does not have a minimum initial deposit requirement, whereas E*TRADE as one of its main competitors requires that its customers deposit at least $500 to get started.
In general, FinTech helps people to invest in the stock market who could not imagine entering this market due to lack of enough money or understanding the market. So it can be said that they are achieving their goal to democratize the market.
Source of table: Robinhood Market website
References:
http://blog.robinhood.com/news/2015/8/12/robinhood-at-a-play-store-near-youhttp://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/020515/how-robinhood-makes-money.asphttps://www.quora.com/Should-someone-begin-investing-by-using-the-Robinhood-apphttps://www.robinhood.comhttps://techcrunch.com/2015/05/07/free-stock-trades/https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/analyst/timeline#/timeline/index