The Pomp Podcast - Robinhood’s Big Bet on Crypto, AI & Tokenized Stocks | Johann Kerbrat

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Johann Kerbrat is the SVP and General Manager of Crypto and International at Robinhood, where he leads the company’s expansion across digital assets and global markets. In this conversation, we discuss the rise of 24/7 trading, evolving retail investor behavior, and Robinhood’s push into areas like tokenization, prediction markets, and institutional crypto services. We also explore how artificial intelligence is shaping financial products and why improving access and education for everyday investors remains a key focus for the future.========================This podcast is sponsored by Abra.com. Abra is the secure way to access crypto and crypto based yield and loan products through a separately managed account structure.Learn more at http://www.abra.com.========================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.========================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.========================0:00 - Intro1:11 - The future of 24/7 trading3:39 - Stocks, crypto & prediction markets on one platform6:30 - How Robinhood builds products internally13:27 - The rise of independent investors15:43 - Stablecoins & global payments16:46 - Tokenized stocks & regulation23:19 - Bitstamp acquisition & institutional crypto25:02 - Hiring, AI & team dynamics26:38 - Robinhood’s goals & global expansion30:18 — APIs, agents & AI trading33:00 - AI financial assistants & advisors38:10 — New banking & family investing features

The advantage of Bitcoin is, and crypto in general, is that it's 24-7. So I think we are going to slowly get into this world where you will see 24-7 trading. I think it's important for accessibility, I think, to trade the news. The reality of Robinhood has been, you know, removing the friction, removing fees when possible, reducing as much as possible the barrier to entry, and also bringing all these educational tools that you have on the platform to make it just a thing that you can actually do, because now you're learning and you know what to do moving forward.

What's going on, guys? Today we've got a great conversation with Johan Kerbrot. In this conversation, he is going to explain exactly what is going on at Robinhood. They're one of the fastest growing retail platforms in the world. They've been embracing crypto, prediction markets, equities, tokenization, and much, much more. He is the SVP and general manager of crypto and international at Robinhood. And he's going to not only explain what they're doing from a product standpoint, but also

how they're building products internally, what their investors are doing on the platform. And then we get deep in the details. What's he doing on the platform? How's he using some of the products for his family? and he also helps us better understand what is going on with artificial intelligence, both in the market and at Robinhood. This conversation is packed. I also give him a little bit of a hard time because he's French. From America's perspective, we got to give him a hard time. Here's my latest conversation with Johan Kerbat. All right, Johan, I thought a great

spot is there's a lot of geopolitical uncertainty right now. Obviously, there's missiles dropping in the Middle East. People are trying to figure out what's going on. We've seen bonds, Bitcoin, and gold all do things that we did not expect. We saw bonds go down, we saw gold go down, and Bitcoin went up. I think a lot of people are scratching their head and saying, what is going on. You guys have one of the largest retail trading platforms in the world. You get to see what are they doing? What are they doing? Are they buying? Are they selling? Are they panicked? Are they cool, calm and collected? Yeah. I mean, it depends on the weekend because so many things happen in the past few weekends. But what we've seen so far is that

a lot of our customers are actually taking advantage of the deep and trying to stay afloat of what is happening on the market. Bitcoin has been difficult. It's been going up and down. But So far, it's been fairly resilient if you look at the past 12 months since last February. So overall, I think what the advantage of Bitcoin is and crypto in general is that it's 24-7. So when something happens on the weekend, people can actually use that to trade and use this information to actually take a position. And when you see the weekend chaos, one of the things I find very interesting is Trump, for some reason, he waits till 4.01 p.m. on Friday. he'll say something good or bad aftermarket stuff will uh will react obviously crypto will react and then somehow some way every sunday afternoon right you know an hour before futures open he'll

say something else and market will move again you guys have been one of the pioneers i think of the after hours trading and trying to get as close to 24 5 as possible what's kind of the state of that now and do you see different behavior during the after hours trading yeah absolutely so 24 5 is already live for us so it starts uh on sunday at 8 p.m and it it goes all the way um it's not for all the tickers so we have a limited function but at the end of the day it's really interesting because i think to your point uh on the weekend are things happening but also at night uh during the week and also for some of our customers that are in the uk for example they want to be able to access the market uh when they're awake and not wait for for the us to come in so i think we are

going to slowly get into this world where you will see 24-7 trading. I think it's important for accessibility, I think, to trade the news and also to balance everybody. Because basically, at some point on Sundays, you have futures that open a bit before the market. And so the people that are a bit less sophisticated, we're waiting for the stock market to open. And when these investors are coming in and they're looking at this stuff, you guys now have stocks, you've got crypto, you've got prediction markets, you seem to really kind of be pushing along the way. How siloed is it? Like are investors just saying, hey, I'm a stock investor, let me stick with stocks? Or do you see a lot of cross promotion? No, that's one of the big advantages

of Robinhood. So you have all of it in one place. You also have options, you also have futures now. And I think that's the beauty of the platform is that you can really go from one asset to the other without having to transfer between platform. And you can also create complex strategies. So we see people, for example, buying the ETF, buying the spot crypto. We see people doing hedging with prediction markets or with futures for their position. And I think that's really becoming more and more complicated. And now with AI coming in in place, you will see more and more of these strategies happening in the market. But I think for us, what we've been really focused on is accessibility. We think that if you want to have all your financial investments, all your wallet

into Robinhood, you need to be able to access to all these products. And we shouldn't be the one like deciding which product is good for the customer or not. We should give them access and the educational tool for them to make sure that they understand what they're doing. You think people are using prediction markets for hedging or you think they're just speculating and gambling and all that? I mean, I think it's a combination, right? Like there is definitely people that are using it more because they are interested into sports, for example. But we see a lot of people using some of the new contracts that we have. For example, AI is an example I like to give where if you want to invest in AI right now, you can pick a stock,

you can pick like, you know, NVIDIA, AMD, maybe Google. But it still gives a lot of flexibility into what is going to be returned. Maybe NVIDIA is going to miss a quarter or maybe they are going to miss a contract or something like that, where a contract on AI is a lot simpler and has only like so many outcomes for the customer. And so I think that's really important. And that gives a lot of service investor and other options for them to invest in the market, basically. Yeah. It is interesting when you think of almost, there's like sophisticated contracts that people are trying to do. And then the ones that I just, I'm like, what are we doing here? Or like, how long is the press conference going to be, right? Or what color is someone's tie? That's just pure

speculation. And maybe there's entertainment value to it, right? But I don't think anyone's hedging. Let me hedge on the Gatorade color at the halftime show. That's fair. And Robinhood is actually spending a lot of time into which contract we use on the platform for example we don't do any of the mentioned contracts there are a lot of things that we put on the platform we've been working with regulator for a long time uh we know what can be a problem or not and so uh there are a lot of these contracts that we we stay away from and we focus a bit more on what can have an impact on you know actual the prediction basically yeah so it's trying to be more thoughtful just about what you guys put there um so one of the interesting

stats about robert i think now there's eight different business lines that do at least 100 million of revenue if i remember correctly um the just ship shipping speedway is it more a bit more more okay it's 11 now so you have 11 different business lines with 100 million dollars all right i gotta update my facts um you guys are just shipping at this incredible speed and it does feel like uh it's kind of like a bunch of startups inside one big company can you talk about just like how do you guys build products internally and it does feel like maybe you guys are getting faster now with the rise of ai and i'm assuming that that's playing into some of this yeah it's a combination i think we have a very good structure so basically every of his product

line are almost a little startup within the company um and i think you know vlad or ceo and the entire company has really put a good structure where uh each business line can push a bit on their direction but also we want to create this cohesive ui and ux so that you don't feel like you're jumping between different apps when you're just going between you know crypto and equities, for example. But we also invested a lot into some of these new seeds. And so you're just seeing them materialize now. For example, credit card, banking is also another new seed

that is getting really successful return and feedback from our customers. AI has also definitely played a role. You know, our engineers are all using AI to not just write code, but review code. Also like start thinking, you know, when they are not working, for example. And so we see more and more of our code being shipped through AI or by AI directly.

And I think that's really going to be just the beginning, to be honest. And I think there is so much to do if we really want to, that having tools like this is really important. But for us, AI is not just a tool for internal usage. We're also using it for external customer feature. For example, one that I particularly love is Cortex. we create this digest that we give you for any stock any crypto and it's updated like almost real time and so when you see a notification popping up saying like the bitcoin is up for example you tap on it you will see a digest of what's happening on the market and so you save a

lot of time you're and you're able to really stay on top of the news which i think was something that was missing before because you will have to go on x go on different news website you will miss something and by the time that you're finally up to speed the market has moved um so being able to have all these tools within the app i think is pretty crucial and how do you guys think about just as we get like more into the engineering of it right how do you think about using the major u.s uh model companies how do you think about taking off the shelf like open source thing and then you know fine-tuning it yourself like you know you've been running engineering teams for a long time right so how do you think through some of the decision making for a company that's

obviously got a lot of resources but you can do almost anything right so like the prioritization becomes pretty important. Yeah, we use a lot of the models that exist already. We've been testing different ones. We see which ones are better for different types of usage. So for example,

engineer like one specific model more than our compliance team or marketing team. But I think we're still at the very beginning. It's crazy to think, you know, one year ago, 12 months ago,

how far we've come along with AI. And it used to be that you will look at it as an engineer. It'll be like, okay, it's helpful, but it's not there yet now it's actually really powerful and the amount of tools you can build within just a weekend just playing with ai has been really cool we have a crypto api for example that is available and a few times over the past weekend i've been like working on a little bot that is using the api to trade and i've done that just like in a few hours so it's it's been really

cool to see but when you start thinking about how the acceleration is impacting our team it's really really interesting because for us, we are still a very US-first company. We are starting to expand internationally. And for all of that, we'll need to build features that are more and more personalized and more and more localized for every country. So having AI tools that are going to help us there is pretty critical. Yeah. Now you guys have started to build technology, not just in traditional software, UI, UX type stuff, but now you're building a L2 as well. All right. So this is a little crazy. By the way, I have a theory. I don't know if you're going to like this or not, but here's my theory, is I think that you guys and Coinbase

are locked in this memetic war and almost don't even realize that yet. It's like every time you guys do something, they do it. Every time they do something, you guys do it. And what's fascinating to me is you guys are coming from the equity world and pushing towards this like, hey, we want to offer all these different markets. They're pushing from the crypto world. And frankly, the winner is the consumer. Absolutely. Right? You guys are fighting it out so much, but it's this amazing battle. If you're just a student of business or technology, watching this happen, like obviously the consumer is winning at the end of the day, right?

But talk about this L2 you guys are building. Yeah. And to your point, I think you're totally right. I think the more competition, the better it is for the customer. You reduce fees, it creates innovation. And so I think that's a great thing for Americans in general, that we have like all these big companies fighting each other. I wouldn't say we copy.

A Frenchman saying that's a good deal. Well, true. But you know, I have an American citizenship now. Um, but the, you know, the reality is that I don't think we copy everything that Coinbase does. Like for example, they launched an NFT marketplace. We never did. I think for us, what's really critical is, um, thinking about our own customers.

We spend a lot of time talking to them, uh, doing user research. We discuss, we try to understand what are the issues that they are seeing. Um, one of them was this idea of, uh, tokenization for, for stocks, for example, like we see a lot of people not able to access U.S. stocks and U.S. ETF because they are in a location where getting a U.S. brokerage is difficult. We also see issue with settlement,

instant settlement or T plus one settlement is still a thing here in the U.S. 24-7 is still not there. And so at some point we're like, okay, we need the technology to build all this and we can either use an existing one, like we could use NEL1, we could create our own.

We found a combination of the two. We wanted to have the decentralization of Ethereum, the security of Ethereum, and also the liquidity that is available in all the EVM space. And so that's why we decided to do an L2. That way we can customize everything that we want to do to really make the Robion chain like the best real-world asset chain, and at the same time have all the benefits of Ethereum. So that's how we get to there. And we launched a testnet recently. We are at 45 million transactions, more or less. And I think that's really the most exciting part. We see developers excited to build on the chain. We see that they are not

frustrated by so many chains. They're just thinking about how do we get the distribution from Robinhood? How do we get connected to the tools and products that Robinhood is building? And I think that's pretty critical. Yeah. It is this rise. I call them independent investors. They're people who are getting all their information online. They don't care what what the mainstream media says. So they're thinking independently. Then they want control. They don't trust a lot of financial advisors and stuff like, hey, I want to make the decisions and live or die with the results. And then they're chasing some degree of financial independence, right? They've been convinced my W-2 is not going to get me my financial goal. And so I got to go

do this. And so that independent investor that thinks, acts, and chasing financial independence, that feels like that is the fastest growing segment of finance. And you guys are one of leaders and helping them have the tools to go and actually access the market. Yeah, I think it's one of our big customer segments, but we also have a lot of customers at Robinhood that are first-time investors. And I think for a very long time, these people felt like managing your finance was complicated. You needed to get an advisor, go to a bank. You could only do certain things, only invest in some specific funds.

And what Robinhood did is really took down the barrier to entry. And you can open an account pretty easily. You can invest with as low as $1 in some different stocks or crypto. And I think that's really what people were missing for a long time. And if you think about it, we've done that multiple times for every product that we launch. For example, we launch IRAs where we give you a match. Like if you are working at a big company and you open up for 1K, we do that for IRA for anyone. And so for people that are driving for Uber and all their jobs like this, it's a pretty

big difference from not having a match at all, not having any retirement instrument, to being able to do that and still self-direct and pick what stocks you want to invest in. So I think the reality of Robinhood has been removing the friction, removing fees when possible, reducing as much as possible the barrier to entry, and also bringing all these diseducational tools that you have on the platform to make it just a thing that you can actually do because now you're learning and you know what to do moving forward.

Yeah, it is this like gig economy. Like there's all these like new types of jobs that are happening now. And I think one of the promises has been, hey, there's going to be these ways to access the market that obviously people want. What about like stable coins? Are you seeing, you know,

people get paid in stable coins, use this stuff? Like, what are you seeing there? Yeah, we see a lot of usage of stable on the platform. We are more like an on-ramp, off-ramp. So people basically come to Robinhood, buy USDC, transfer to their wallet or transfer to different platforms that they are using. And vice versa, like people that get paid, for example, in USDC, transfer to Robinhood and then convert to cash. What we see the most usage on our side is also between institutions and between the market maker we work with, the liquidity providers. All of them, we work with them 24-7.

So when it's Saturday, we can't wait for the Fed wire to open on Monday, right? So we use stable coin for that. And I think, you know, you go to some places in the world, they actually prefer you to receive like stable coin versus cash because they can verify that it's real. It's not like a fake bill and whatever, and they can actually use it everywhere they go. Yeah, it is definitely a product that has product market fit. You know, I would say like Bitcoin, stable coins, exchanges, tokenization is I think the fourth thing that everyone is looking for to be successful.

You guys have 2,000 different stocks, I think, now. But interestingly, you have 2,000 stocks in Europe. Yeah, that's right. On-chain. That's right. And do you offer them in the US or just in Europe? Not yet. Okay.

So is that a regulatory thing or a product decision or a combination? A combination of the two, I think. In the EU, you have already this framework. It's called MICA or MIFID. It's basically a small equivalent of the clarity acts that's being passed in the US. And so we have this framework where we can offer this structure, we call it the stock tokens. We started in June with 200, now we're at 2,000. And so you can see that our engine is working pretty well and that basically you could expand to any asset, any reward asset in my opinion.

Stablecoin to me is probably the first example of tokenization. You took a real asset and then you created a token that represented it. And I think for the US, there's still a lot of debates. We meet regularly with the regulators. We discuss a lot about it. And I think there is a ton of benefits. Instant settlement, like we mentioned. Right now, if you buy a stock on Friday, you're still waiting Monday basically for the real exchange to happen. 24-7 is going to be a pretty big part of it. But I also think the access to all the exchange of the world and to other type of assets, private equity, real estate, arts, all these things can be tokenized and can be a lot more accessible if you can go to any exchange and find the token that you care about versus

currently where you have to find the right platform, you have to invest in specific ways for SPVs and all these kinds of things. Now, when people tokenize these assets, there's a couple of different ways they've done it. There's like, let me take the asset, put in an SPV, tokenize the SPV. There is, maybe if you go to the other really far extreme, I think figure technologies. I was talking to Mike Cagney recently and they will actually let you create native stock that is digital, that doesn't replace, it's just kind of like its own thing. Where are you guys right now in terms of how you guys are doing tokenization? And then is there like an end goal or thing that you're trying to get to?

Yeah, I think there will be a bit of a shift in culture and how you think about tokenization. um the the idea for us of like you can directly issue um stocks on the chain we we can support it like our tokenization engine doesn't really have um any problem to support it but going after every single company that are on the market on nasdaq on ic and asking them to issue a specific amount of their float on chain it's just not scalable um so the the way that our system work in the EU is that we have a derivative in between that basically tracks the price of the stock and still give you a dividend in cash, still give you corporate action results and all this kind of things. And I think, you know, three, four, five years from now, probably like the

shift will be to direct issuance because a lot more of the NYSE, NASDAQ, all of these people are starting to get on chain. And at some point, everyone will be on chain. And so it will be a disadvantage for you to not do it. But we are at step zero, basically, day one. And so I think we just found a good balance between the two systems. Yeah. What have been the downsides or the big challenges in doing all this? Are there things that you guys ran into that if you could start over, you'd be like, hey, these are the things we would try to solve first? I don't know if I would change things. I think for us, if I could start over, it would be coming five years ago and Talking to the administration and being like, hey, we're going to be left behind, behind the EU, behind other countries, where they have this framework.

And so it's a bit sad, to be honest, to see some of the progress that we've been able to do in other parts of the world. But I think right now we are seeing a lot of change. We are seeing a lot of push around the genius act, around clarity. And so I think we're on a good path here. So you're basically saying the American trope of Europe is a museum is not true. They're ahead when it comes to crypto regulation. For a bit, it was crazy to think about it because I moved away from the EU for that reason

because the US was first. But yeah, for a bit, Mika framework was in front of the US. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra, the secure way to grow crypto wealth. Abra offers individuals and institutions end-to-end crypto wealth management solutions,

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to help you access real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best part. As a Pomp podcast listener, you can earn up to $1,000 in rewards. All you have to do is add funds to your account. Search for Bitcoin IRA in the App Store or visit BitcoinIRA.com slash Pomp, and you can join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. That's bitcoinira.com slash pomp to upgrade your retirement today. Bitstamp, you were very involved in the acquisition of that. What's the latest on that acquisition? Yeah, I mean, Bitstamp is doing great. We have a lot of platforms. So basically, we have a white label solution where you can create crypto as a service. And we are seeing banks embedding this system so that they can offer

crypto to their customer. For buying and selling? Yeah, for buying, selling, holding, staking, all these kind of things. So that's been very encouraging because with the regulation coming in, a lot more companies want to actually offer crypto to their customer. But instead of building everything from scratch, they can use white label solutions like the Bitstamp one. We've also done a lot of work on the technology around the exchange and the matching engine.

So we're able to support more and more operation on the platform. So overall, it's been a great acquisition. also allowed us to really get into this institutional business that we were not really present before. We were mostly focused on retail. So, yeah. What are you doing on the institutional side? So we work with market maker, hedge fund, family offices,

ETF provider, for example, resource liquidity for them, the white label solution as well, staking, like all of these kind of products, basically. So pretty much you're just taking the retail offering and now saying, hey, how do we evolve this for the institutions themselves? They want the same end service, just maybe in a different wrapper or something. Basically.

And because we built one of the largest retail platforms in the US, a lot of people want to be able to use the same type of technology that we built. The other advantage that we have is that on Robinhood, we have a lot of this take your flow, basically, like the non-toxic flow that is buying. And so combining the two with Bitstamp is really helpful for the liquidity on the exchange as well. That makes sense. When you're recruiting people on the team now, are you guys not hiring as many people because of AI? Or talk about the actual team dynamics and who you're looking for, et cetera.

I find it very fascinating that you understand the business side, but also the engineering side and AI is kind of hitting both at the same time. Yeah, I think if you look at our job portal, like you can see, we still hire quite a lot because we are really growing as a company, not just on the crypto side,

but across the entire company. And like I said before, We're also expanding in the rest of the world. And so for us, we still need to hire a lot of folks. But I think AI for us, we see it as a tool. We do a lot of training, for example, because we have a lot of the current employees that didn't necessarily grow up with AI,

like the new grads that are coming in today. So we do a lot of training. We provide all the tools for people. And I think at the end of the day, it's going to be a bit of a function of making sure that what we build with AI is beneficial for all the teams. So, for example, compliance, instead of spending too much time reading very specific messages or documents, how can we use AI to improve the digest, for example, so that you don't spend as much time on reading a document?

And we want to do that across the entire company to make sure that we can accelerate basically the product that we're trying to ship. So at this point, I think AI is going to be just a great way for us to optimize everything that we do and also spend less time on things that are maybe the less exciting part of the job and more about thinking about how to build and how to achieve the goals that we have. What are your goals for the next 12 months? International expansion is really a big one for us.

And then really pushing on advanced traders. For a long time, Robinhood was seen as a place to buy crypto, but more for the simple side of things. Now we are really pushing on the advanced traders. So you can buy crypto as low as three basis points now, depending on your volume tier. You can do staking, for example, that we didn't have for a very long time. And we have more and more coins being listed on the platform. So for us, it's been really interesting to see how we've seen a shift on our customer segment.

We see more and more of these advanced traders coming from other platforms. And so we are going to continue on this journey. You mentioned earlier a kind of a discipline as to picking your spot when you guys go to build something versus when you don't. You're building an L2, but I don't think I've heard you guys are building a stablecoin. No. What is the thought process as to maybe not going into the stablecoin game?

Yeah, so actually we joined a consortium. It's called the Global Dollar Network. It's issuing a stablecoin called USDG. And basically it's a consortium of big companies, Kraken, OKEx, Bullish, and others are part of it. And so the idea was the stablecoin is going to become a commodity At this point, there's maybe already 50 different stablecoins. And so there isn't really much that we can do that is going to be different from what

USDC or what USDT is doing. But what we care about was the revenue coming from the stablecoins, what we call the NIEM. We wanted to distribute it with our customer, either institution or either retail if we can, depending on the regulation. And so based on that, we wanted to find a solution where the revenue is not locked with the issuer. And that's what the consortium is doing. So it distributes all the revenue with the member of the consortium.

People can join the consortium. It's not just limited to the four companies I listed. And based on that, you can actually create a lot more tools and features on your products. And so we think that's really important. And we're just at the beginning on USDG as well. started to use it internally uh we haven't put it in front of our customer yet but it's it's going to come soon so just make sure i understand how this consortium works is you guys join a couple other let's just say 10 there's 10 companies total uh you take all of the revenue minus whatever it

takes to actually run the uh the stable coin and then it gets divvied out probably on like some prorata basis depending on how much volume is yours right and then once you guys get that you can do whatever you want you can put in your pocket you can give it to your users whatever but the whole idea of the consortium is it's kind of like this like decentralized ownership essentially of a stable coin. Exactly. And the idea was really also that creates a network effect, right?

Because Kraken and Bullish are going to also use USDG. So when people want to move between this platform, we're already kind of all incentivized to make sure that it's well done. Where like all these other stable coins that are popping left and right,

at some point it's good for the people that are issuing it, but it's not necessarily good for everyone else. And I think that was something that was really important to us. the NIM coming from a stablecoin. Right now, if you're a customer

and you hold $10,000 worth of USDC on a specific platform, you're not going to make any revenue from it. You're not going to get any yield, any NIM, no matter what. But if you're holding $10,000 of cash, you can actually get yield. So it doesn't really make a ton of sense, right?

Like we are making it more complicated for people to use the technology. And so what we thought was we really need to find a way where we can actually pass the yield to the customer. Interesting. You guys have this like open developer ecosystem versus you guys have some closed components of the financial infrastructure that you've built. How do you think about whether you kind of open it up or you keep it closed? And is there some framework or decision? And the reason I ask is, you mentioned earlier, the API allows for your like AI bot to go trade. With the rise of AI, it seems like everyone wants just like, hey, just open it up for me, right? Like I can do all kinds of crazy stuff, but there's some competitive components as to why you might not want to do that. Well, there's a few things, right? There is competitive reason, there is regulatory reason,

there is compliance reason, there is a ton of reason, right? So, for example, every customer on robin.kyc is fully verified. So there is some things that we need to do there to be compliant with our licenses. But we do want to make sure that our APIs are usable. So we started with Crypto. It's probably the easiest for us to open. But definitely seeing a lot of people starting to play with MCPs and things like that.

So we'll see more and more of that, I think. Is there any data internally that suggests that agents are becoming a material part of the usage of Robinhood? Like I've seen a couple of companies say, hey, now more than 50% of our documentation is read by agents instead of people. I don't assume that Robinhood's 50%, but is it like 1% or 2% or do you not know? I don't think we have data on this one. Our API, for example, it's still pretty small

compared to the volume that we see on a daily basis. But, you know, we see a lot more people coming up with new usage of AI on a daily basis. Like when you look at X, it's pretty crazy. So I wouldn't be surprised if at some point it changed. Do you feel like you guys are behind just given no matter how many resources you have, it's like every day somebody is out releasing something.

And, you know, I'd say you could sit on X all day long and you could be thinking you know everything. And then you see something, you're like, oh my God, I'm going to learn about this thing now. I personally feel some time behind because I feel like if I travel for three days and I miss all the news on X, it's definitely something where- If you're a normal person, you're not on the internet for three days. But I think the company, Robinhood, has been, and credit to our CEO, Vlad, has been really pushing on AI from the beginning. So it's been years now that we have more and more of this tooling available internally, and we've been building features for AI for a long time for our customers.

So I actually feel pretty good at the Robinhood level. Well, he's got the AI math thing, right? He also has that, yeah. So it's definitely like one of his brain that is thinking 10 years before everyone else. Somebody told me not to say this a long time ago, but I stopped paying attention to math when they started putting letters in the equation.

I thought it was supposed to just be numbers, right? This guy's too smart for me. AI, there's a big debate right now. Is it going to replace financial advisors? I think you guys have a Robinhood AI advisor on the platform. How does that work? Or what is your guys' thought process there? Yeah, we started to roll out our assistance and it's all about, you know, having a specific feature that is related to your portfolio.

And so knowing what's going on in the market, knowing what else you could think about when you want to diversify, like this kind of thing. So it's not giving you advice, investment advice per se, but it's also helping you find what to do. So I think it's going to become more and more smart the more we work on it and we're able to build a lot of this tooling. But there is also a need for regulation around AI and how it's going to impact financial services. So, you know, for us, we are mostly thinking about how to use AI more as an educational tool at this point than as an investment tool. Yeah. Is there a world where like you guys will build a bunch of agents and I just give it my money and it just, you know, goes hog wild in the market and makes me money? I mean, at some point, you know, I think the agent is... It feels like that's where it's going, right?

It's becoming more and more interesting. I don't know yet if Robinhood would be the one building the agent, but what we want to make sure is that we have actually the tools that the agent can use. Yeah, because I guess part of what is interesting to me is like everything starts off as information, right? So, you know, whether you're using ChatGPT, Robinhood Advice, whatever. And then over time, it becomes obvious because I've used more and more of it. I realize I'm the blocker, right? Like the human in the loop actually is slowing down the machine. And, you know, sometimes it's a good thing, right?

I say, you know, I could do this. Are you sure you want me to do it? Okay. That's nice. But for something like an investment decision, right? If the model or agent is saying, okay, based on all this information, here's something I think you should consider. And then you've got to go be the one to press the button. Like at some point, people will just be comfortable and like, let the machine press the button, right? Yeah. I also think there's a ton of interesting use cases. So for example, let's say you had a ton of capital gain and you want to lock it and wait for long-term,

you can use different options. It's very complicated to calculate which one and to create the right corridor but the ai tool can can actually help you on all of these things learning the market knowing how to diversify knowing which product to look at if you're if you care about ai for example which stocks to think about like all these kind of things i think are a bit more on the helping you as a customer and i think like we're doing pretty good at this but yeah i could see a world where agents are going to take more and more of that yeah and And also, I've talked to a lot of financial advisors. We built this AI CFO product.

And one of the things that's interesting with the RIAs is it's very split. Half of them are like, you AI people are idiots and you're going to try to automate my job. And they're all kind of hung up. But the other half are like, hey, this is a tool to make me better at serving my client. And so the truth is probably somewhere in between. It is helpful, but also will automate some of the job. But it is very interesting to see what my experience has been is the people who want to embrace it tend to have bigger businesses than the people who are like a little bit more, you know, protecting the old school way. Yeah, I think it's like every technology, you know, back when Google started or when Google Docs and Word and spreadsheets and all these kind of things, there was always like the reticent people and then the people that started to embrace it.

I think we're at the same situation here where if you don't embrace AI, you're going probably to be left behind at some point. When you start really understanding how to use it, it's extremely powerful. And so I think you will see hedge funds, you will see family offices all incorporating AI. And maybe it will replace some specific jobs, but you also see new jobs coming in and the AI expert of the group or the people that are helping create the right agents our skills, all these kinds of things. And yeah, I think we are just at the beginning. And to your point, I still think there's a lot of things where if you just create one skills, Cloud will try to do whatever it can to make you happy. So they are going to try to do crazy

things. So there is still a lot of need for the human in the loop and it will be interesting to see where it goes. You know what's funny is I talked to Ben Serra. He's the one who's doing pulsia you know the the company that's got millions of revenue and no employees or whatever and i asked him you know what is your day like like if everything's automated like what do you do all day and uh in hindsight it was an obvious answer he's like oh i just focus on marketing right he's just like all of this is automated and so it's all about distribution which you know if you've ever built a company before you're like yeah distribution is really really important and so almost the human is left to do the thing that you know um sure a lot of it is automated for

distribution, but still he's constantly thinking about how do I find more distribution. And I think that's going to be critical, especially now with AI. The agents also will need to find the solution to print drag. So there's also this aspect on how do you market to other agents and other AI

bots and all those kind of things. You see a bit of SEO coming up for ChatGPD and Gemini platform and all this stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if you see more of that. It's very interesting. Is there anything that you guys are doing internally that people aren't paying as much attention to but you're very excited about like

you think is uh um you're like hey you know we're talking about this like you know pay attention over here uh banking has been really exciting for me like we we also launched recently a suite of product for families um so i have a what is that um so basically you can create a custodial account for your for your children okay uh you you have a very cool i created one for my son and you have this link that you can send to your friend and family and they can fund using stocks and cash. That was really cool because people kept sending me checks and I was like,

I don't even know what to do with this anymore. I got to get your friend. Getting checks. My friends send me invoices, not checks. Well, you know, for the kids, not for us. But I think that's being... It's really important because there's this big wealth transfer coming in

in the next few years. And I think for us being ready to have the entire family was really important. And it was also very frustrating. Like all my assets were on Robinhood, but I still needed to have a separate account for my kid. And so being able to have all of this in one place was pretty cool. And we're doing more and more of this type of products that are for the entire family. So you can have your joint account with your partner. You can see which investment account you want to or if you want to trade for them. So we're really taking it to the next level

of not being Robinhood just for you as an individual, but for your entire family. That's cool. And is that part of the whole Trump account and Invest America? No, that's separate. It's a separate thing, right? Yeah.

But a similar idea, right? Even if the government isn't putting money in, people can send money for the kid. It's pretty cool. Right. And you can really invest. So I started this account. I'm thinking for college for him.

I mean, he still has a very long way to go. The world's going to be with the AI stuff. We're all going to be retired in the French countryside. The college. But at least, you know, he will have this account that at 80, I forgot what age I put. You can select what age you will transfer to. Oh, interesting.

And so when it's time for that, he will be able to get access to the account and continue the investment. You know what I think is cool is, I don't know how old your kid is, but when they're young, they've got no clue, not interested. right? But at some point it will switch and then it'll become like, they want to talk with you about what are we doing in here? Cause I see the number going up, you know, a little bit of a video game. And, uh, it kind of is like putting, um, uh, training wheels on a bike, right? Like you get the experience of riding the bike, but you know, somebody is there to make sure you don't

mess it up. Right. Yeah. And I think that's part of, you know, this education that we were talking about is for, for a long time, I feel like finance was a bit taboo in some family. You don't talk about how much you're making about, uh, what money is and all these things, but it's actually the opposite that you need to do. You need to start talking to your children about money and thinking about finance so that when they get to 18 and they start being by themselves, they understand what is a budget. They understand like to think about taxes when they have a job. And so I think, again, like having access to things like starting to to use it is kind of

critical. And we see that with crypto, for example, when people start, you know, buying their first like five bucks of X coin, then they start following the news. They start getting interested and slowly they get more and more into the investment route. Do you know the Ken Rishi rule? No, I don't know that one. Ken Rishi is a guy who built a number of like private jet type companies. He was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Gunjan over there interviewed him.

And he talks about, I can't remember if it's monthly or quarterly. He does a family meeting about money. And okay, a lot of families, you know, do not all of them, but a lot of them are pretty good idea. Except for he said one thing that he does. He says that he starts off the meeting and he tells them his net worth and where all of his assets are. And he goes, in case something happens to me, you know, I want them to get, you know, normal and whatever. Little out there, right?

But still, okay, kind of cool. But then he said that he makes his kids tell each other what their net worths are. I said, this guy is stoking competition in the family. Yeah, that I don't know if it's a... And his point was they should learn from each other. I mean, he had a very thoughtful reason why he did it. But I grew up in a family of five boys. I'm like, if my parents sat us down and were like,

y'all got to tell each other there's net worth, first of all, they would all lie, right? But second of all, that's all they would focus on, right? It's like, I got to go to the next meeting and make sure I made more money than everybody else. Well, but also you will share your advice. You will share about the IRA or 401k, whatever, like all this stuff.

When I moved here into the US, I didn't know anything about 401k. I was like, what is this thing? They don't have anything in France? We have different type of retirement account. And so it's more limited. You can't really do the same thing as you can do here. In the US, we think everyone in France is retired.

But that's one thing we are seeing also in Europe, right? It's like more and more countries are starting to think about pushing the retirement age. Some countries are talking about you won't get the full amount. And so you're starting to see this shift that we've seen in the US a long time ago, where a lot of people are investing in the US. They are self-direct investing. In Europe, it's still pretty small. but you're starting to see this growth happening

because people are thinking about their retirement and it's not going to be guaranteed by the state anymore. So they need to start thinking about that when they're like 20, basically. Yeah, it makes sense. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Me? Yeah, you.

Oh, join Kerber Hutt on Twitter. They know where to find me. They're here for you. On Robinhood, basically. Robinhood.com. Yep. Amazing. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

We'll do it again in the future. No, thank you.