Fintech Brokerage Robinhood Launches Spotify-Like Web Platform

Robinhood, the fintech brokerage that offers commission-free trading through a mobile app, announced Wednesday it's launching a web platform.

“Our mission is to make financial services more accessible to more people,” said Robinhood co-founder and CEO Baiju Bhatt in an interview with Benzinga. “Robinhood For Web is a much bigger canvas for us to build on.”

Bhatt says the web trading platform is primarily geared towards informing people who are interested in investing about the stock market. However, the company faces an interesting product design challenge, in that about half of its users have invested previously on another platform.

To equip itself to build a web brokerage product that functioned as an entry-level educational tool and offered enough functionality for an experienced trader, Robinhood spent three months on consumer research.

“We found that when people buy stocks online, it’s similar to [the way they shop] on an ecommerce site—there’s a lot of comparison shopping,” Bhatt said.

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The company realized that the user experience people are used to on Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN and apps like Spotify could be applied to brokerage. Much like Spotify, Robinhood For Web will offer “Collections” of stocks, which are essentially playlists of similar stocks. The playlist will also feature an onboard social sharing aspect that shows the prices others paid for a stock, and other stocks they bought.

Robinhood has also partnered with Morningstar, Inc. MORN to feed its analyst ratings into the app, so users get expert opinions as well as crowd-sourced sentiment.

The company has 3 million users, and Bhatt says Robinhood has saved its users over $1 billion in commissions.

Photo credit: Robinhood