Robinhood
Removing all the barriers to stock trading
Robinhood is the worlds most innovative financial services company ... with a mission to democratise access to the financial markets, with a simple smartphone app.
Robinhood is an app-based stock brokerage that offers commission-free trading. It was founded in Palo Alto in 2014 by two former Stanford roommates, Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev.
Robinhood is currently available in the U.S. and is accepting users to its waitlist for an upcoming launch in Australia, where fees for a single trade can run up $65 USD. The various fees attached to trading stocks often deters young people from entering the market, but by eliminating fees and streamlining the process, Robinhood hopes to open up trading to a new demographic.
The tool is the fastest-growing brokerage in history, with hundreds of thousands of customers and more than $2 billion in transactions. In 2015 it raised $50 million in funding and won an Apple Design Award–the first finance app to do so. Now the company is letting developers build its functionality into already existing products like StockTwits and Quantopian, which could revolutionize trading.
The company is eyeing international expansion and already has 20,000 people in Australia waiting to get in.
(Extract from Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2016 which ranked Robinhood as the world’s most innovative financial services company)
