Robinhood wants to be the Costco of finance
Robinhood wants to be the Costco of finance
When Robinhood thinks about how it positions its program, it doesnât just look at other brokerages or financial services apps for inspiration. It looks at companies like Costco.
âWe want it to be the best deal in financial services,â Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhoodâs vice president of product management for brokerage, told in a about how the company builds products.
âThere are a lot of analogs we look at that are not in the financial services industry that we respect a lot when we think about Gold. We think about Costco as a model for what we want to do with Gold. You buy the Costco membership and you just know the moment you walk into a Costco, youâre getting the best deal and the best products, no matter what youâre buying.â
Amazon Prime, he added, is another reference point â a successful membership business alongside Netflix and Spotify. âWhen we think about what we aspire for Robinhood Gold to be, itâs kind of the best deal in financial services.â
Itâs an unusual framing for a brokerage, and it helps explain not only why Robinhood looks the way it does today but also where itâs headed.
A different way of building
Fatehpuria joined Robinhood as an intern in 2016, three years after the company launched. At the time, Robinhood had about 40 people working out of a small office in Palo Alto. Nearly a decade later, heâs overseeing a product surface that now spans , options, futures, , a credit card, and an AI assistant called Cortex. Most recently, the team launched agentic trading, which allows customers to authorize a third-party AI agent to execute trades in a dedicated, customer-funded Robinhood account.
For a company shipping that much, that fast, the natural question is how it all fits together. Open the Robinhood app today and the surface area is genuinely large â but the products feel intentional rather than bolted on. To Finder, which has and products extensively over the years, the coherence is unusual for a fintech expanding this fast.
Fatehpuria said itâs intentional. The teamâs first criterion for any new product is whether it would succeed on its own, independent of Robinhoodâs existing customer base.
âEach product we have independently should be successful,â he explained. âIf it has to ride the coattails of one of our existing products, it probably means that product in and of itself isnât the best version of that product.â
He pointed to the and the as examples â products he believes would attract customers regardless of whether the rest of Robinhood existed. Only after a product passes that bar does the team start thinking about how it fits into the larger ecosystem.
âA lot of products jump to the second step very early,â he said. âTheyâre like, âOkay, Iâve already got this huge base of users, I have a very successful product, now let me just add things onto it.â One thing weâre very intentional about is: âWill these products be independently amazing?ââ
A lesson learned
For all of Robinhoodâs product velocity, not everything has landed. Asked about a lesson the team learned the hard way, Fatehpuria pointed to a recent example.
âA couple years ago, we had this bigger redesign of the Robinhood app that we had tried. It was modular â you could move little widgets around on the screen. We didnât roll it out very widely, but it was a big overhaul, a big change from how itâs worked for 10 years. Customers didnât love it. The numbers showed that it wasnât really working.â
Robinhood took a different direction. Since then, the teamâs approach to evolving the core app has shifted to something more incremental â tweaks to navigation, search improvements, performance upgrades â rather than sweeping redesigns.
âThat was a big lesson for a lot of us,â Fatehpuria said.
The discipline of saying no
One of the more striking things about how Fatehpuria talks about product is his framing of restraint. Customers constantly ask Robinhood for new products, but not every request becomes a roadmap item.
âThereâs a lot of things every year that we say no to,â he said. âFor me, when weâre talking about the roadmap, thereâs a distinction between someone saying they want something and it being the reason they would leave the platform. I would much rather be in a position where a customer is like, âI love what Robinhood has to offer, but they donât quite offer the exact thing I need yet, but when they offer it, Iâll come to Robinhood,â than be in the position where theyâre saying Robinhood offers everything, but itâs not great.â
That approach can frustrate vocal customers. Fatehpuria acknowledged he sees the complaints â particularly from active traders. âIâll look on Twitter and Iâll see the complaint. Someoneâs a super active trader, and theyâre like, âWhy is Robinhood spending all this time building this other thing that doesnât really matter to me?â And the answer is because that matters to a lot of people. Maybe it doesnât matter to that specific person.â
A feature most customers donât know about
Asked what feature he thinks is underused, something Robinhood customers would get more value from if they knew it existed, Fatehpuria said the multiple brokerage accounts feature the company launched last year.
âIt really helps you separate your strategies, which is a big thing for investors. I might have my actively traded portfolio on one side, and then my dividend, long-term investing portfolio. That feature really helps me separate the two, watch their PL [profit and loss] differently, see how each is independently doing.â
He said itâs underused partly because of discovery, partly because of education and partly because it requires some setup. âIt takes a little bit of work because you have to open a new account. We try to make it as seamless as possible. But itâs really, really powerful. The customers who use it end up loving Robinhood a lot more.â
Whatâs next: AI as the interface
The conversation eventually turned to where Robinhood is headed, and Fatehpuria was direct about one thing: AI is core to the productâs future.
Cortex, Robinhoodâs family of AI products, is approaching one million users, he said. The current lineup includes stock-level digests, portfolio-level digests and a conversational assistant thatâs still being iterated on.
The hardest part of building AI in a financial-services context, Fatehpuria said, is correctness.
âBecause we operate in financial services, the bar for correctness is very high. Weâre not going to random websites and pulling information to answer questions. Weâre carefully vetting the data vendors, carefully vetting what data is being used. The tolerance for errors is much lower, especially when itâs right in your brokerage account.â
And looking out a year? âYouâre going to have to stay tuned for that for the most part,â he said. âBut at a high level, we think about AI from how can it best assist active traders? Active traders are the ones consuming lots of data to come up with unique edge and unique insights that they can trade on. So thatâs one angle. And the second, more medium-to-long-term angle weâve been thinking about with AI is how do we meaningfully give you financial guidance?â
Why heâs still at Robinhood
Almost ten years at one company is rare in tech. Asked what keeps him excited, Fatehpuria pointed to the roadmap and his team.
âWe have infinite ambition. The roadmap is packed. We always have things weâre saying no to. Weâre not searching for things to say yes to, which is a sign that the roadmap is full. We have lots of products to build.â
He pointed to AI, private markets through and other technology trends as areas the company is investing in. âThereâs just so many interesting things that we can do and are doing. In addition to that, the talent density at the company is very high. So I get a lot of enjoyment working with everyone here.â
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