Robinhood said today it plans to make ‘hundreds of additional hires’ to fill its offices in Southlake, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as a surge in retail investing drove millions to its platform.
Even as the pandemic slowed, or completely halted hiring elsewhere, the commission-free investment platform is expanding the team of registered financial representatives. Explaining the rationale behind that, Robinhood said it is moving forward with adding new employees in order to reduce response times, as well as “building more self-service tools, and enhancing the information and education to enable more informed investment decisions,” it added in a blog post.
Previously, Robinhood announced in October 2019 it is looking to fill a total of 800 full-time positions nationwide. Covid-19 has not had an impact on its 2020’s hiring plans as its traders kept their foot on the gas, making a number of trades that were higher than all of its publicly traded rivals.
“We’ve more than doubled our support team since January and we’ll continue to grow our teams to provide timely, helpful responses to our customers. We look forward to expanding in Southlake and Tempe where a wealth of highly skilled and trained registered financial representatives are located ,” said Alex Mesa, Head of Customer Experience at Robinhood.
Robinhood Outperforms Rivals with Record Volumes
Robinhood’s hiring goals are still as aggressive as they were last year after its platforms hosted 4.3 million daily average revenue trades, or DARTS, in June 2019. That compares to 3.84 million DARTs reported by TD Ameritrade, while Interactive Brokers saw 1.8 million DARTs in the same month, followed by Charles Schwab and E-Trade at 1.8 million and 1.1 million, respectively.
Robinhood, which has more than 13 million accounts, added 3 million new customer accounts to its total between the start of the year and early May.
To put its impressive metrics in context, the New York Startup has been able to bring on more customers than TD Ameritrade, which onboards 11 million users. Historically, it has been in the online brokerage industry since 1975. Though one of Robinhood’s biggest competitors, E-Trade, had 4.9 million brokerage accounts at the end of 2019, with an annualized new account growth rate of seven percent.
Nevertheless, the no-fee investing app has temporarily abandoned its plans of venturing outside the United States, and Britain will not be able to sign up to get access to its stock trading service at least until the end of 2020. Robinhood explained that rather than pursuing global expansion, it would instead focus on strengthening its infrastructure and look to bond with clients after recent outages.
