Robinhood Takes an Option Out on Owning Customer Transactions

Robinhood is moving beyond its original role as a retail broker. And that’s despite the fact that the second-quarter 2026 results shared company’s Tuesday (July 28) earnings call looked like a victory for its trading business.

Robinhood reported record quarterly revenue of $1.3 billion, up 32% from a year earlier, alongside $22 billion in net deposits and a 57% adjusted EBITDA margin. Activity reached new highs across equities, options and prediction markets, while the company added its strongest quarterly funded customer gain in almost five years to brush up against the 1 million number. But executives stressed that Robinhood’s next phase is not primarily about processing more trades. Across prediction markets, tokenized assets, banking and credit cards, the financial platform is attempting to control more of the customer relationship and more of the transaction stack beneath it.

Robinhood Sees Its Brokerage as an Acquisition Engine Rather than connecting customers to products, exchanges and market makers operated by others, Robinhood executives shared their goal of becoming the system through which customers receive income, spend money, build savings, invest, access credit and eventually delegate financial decisions to artificial intelligence. A customer might arrive for stocks, options, crypto, retirement accounts, prediction markets, banking or a credit card. Robinhood’s goal is then to convert that customer into a Gold subscriber and introduce additional services. Management said roughly 40% to 50% of new customers subscribe to Gold, regardless of which product initially brought them to the platform. Customers who use prediction markets, for example, are also more likely to hold Robinhood retirement accounts. The number of customers who have traded prediction-market contracts has grown from about 1.5 million to nearly 2 million. Robinhood’s credit card has surpassed 1 million cardholders and is generating more than $17 billion in annualized purchase volume. Its banking offering has a...