I still laugh about the first time I met Robb Baldwin.
He was in the San Francisco Bay Area to visit some financial advisors and stopped by the Robinhood office in Menlo Park to meet with our corporate development team. Someone on the team invited me to dinner with Robb and the group. My first thought was, “Sure, yeah. Why not? I mean, it is my 60th birthday today. No big deal.” So there I was, celebrating the milestone with Robb, our CEO Vlad Tenev, and the corporate dev team.
But that’s not even the funniest part. Before dinner, Vlad offered to pick Robb up in his sports car and drive him to a favorite coffee shop in Palo Alto. It was a small car and Robb is a tall guy. They had to take the T‑top off just to fit him in. I can still picture Robb riding around Silicon Valley with his head sticking out the top of that car.
For dinner, we took Robb to this classic steakhouse. He looked at the menu and said, “You know, I don’t eat meat.”
So yeah, things didn’t get off on a good foot with Robinhood and the Founder and CEO of TradePMR. We picked him up in a car he was too tall for and we took him to a restaurant that specialized in food he doesn’t eat.
Thankfully, Robb’s a great guy who can talk about virtually anything, and we quickly moved on from the small car and restaurant choice snafus. We connected over sports—he’s obviously a big Florida guy—and then discussed business: how things were going at TradePMR and serving the registered investment advisor (RIA) market.
As funny as that first day had been, it ended up marking the beginning of something transformative. Now that TradePMR is part of Robinhood, we believe we can redefine the wealth management industry for the future.
Long before we met Robb, I spoke with Vlad and the rest of Robinhood’s leadership team about building an avenue for our customers who may want to move beyond self-directed investing. We’ve had a lot of success in our mission to democratize finance and bring millions of people into markets (often for the first time), but some of them are starting to mature and accrue larger amounts of assets. And they were starting to ask us for more help managing their wealth.
We analyzed a few of the options that would be natural growth engines, such as 401(k)s and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), but it was clear that the best option for our customers was the RIA channel.
I knew about the RIA industry from my time at TD Ameritrade. While I had always worked on the self-directed trading side of the business, I collaborated closely with the RIA custody group, which had grown into one of the industry’s major players before it was acquired.
Working with them taught me two things. The first: The advisor channel is critical if you want to manage a customer’s full financial journey. The second: It’s not an easy operation to build from scratch. Plenty of firms have tried to pivot into financial advice and failed.
To successfully enter the RIA space, we would need a talented team that truly understood the job ahead of them. We could either lure that talent away from other firms one-by-one, or we could jumpstart the entire process by bringing on an existing team.
With that as the catalyst, we started to survey the wealth management landscape. TradePMR stood out. I didn’t know Robb, other than knowing he was the founder of this successful company, but I did recognize the names of several of my old TD colleagues on the TradePMR roster. I knew right off the bat that they had a talented team.
The more we looked, the more it became evident that Robinhood and TradePMR both championed innovation and were mission-aligned.
We’re both forward-thinking in how we address customer needs through technology and committed to providing a level of customer service that goes beyond standard offerings.
Add all of that together with TradePMR’s track record of successfully attracting RIAs from larger custodians, and it became quite obvious that bringing TradePMR onboard would be the best solution to our mission of making Robinhood into a comprehensive, multi-generational financial services company.
After that, the challenge became keeping our interest in acquiring TradePMR a secret, especially when I knew so many of the people on their team. The circle of people who knew about a potential deal needed to stay small, and I wanted to get information from my former colleagues, without tipping my hand. It was a delicate dance.
At the same time, the Robinhood team and I were educating ourselves on the RIA space. Wealth management is one of the fastest growing sectors of financial services, and RIAs remain the fastest growing channel in wealth, according to data from Cerulli Associates. Many expect that to continue thanks to an estimated $124 trillion expected to pass from Baby Boomers to their heirs. That data was a solid indicator that we were on the right path.
We also had to learn about the culture and operations of TradePMR as it would eventually blend with ours. Robinhood is a digitally led, scaled business. If we want growth, we know what levers to pull. We can turn on a marketing campaign, measure the results, and adjust.The RIA custody business doesn’t work like that. Advisors don’t switch because they see an ad. They’ve often been with their custodian for decades. It’s a relationship business, and building trust takes time.
Joining TradePMR at the annual TradePMR Synergy conference was particularly enlightening for me and my team. Talking with financial advisors was energizing because I realized they’re all entrepreneurs who want to serve their clients well. They don’t always have the resources to deploy AI at scale, or build the kind of tech that a consumer-facing tech company can, but they want to do right by their clients.
That’s where Robinhood can offer something that no one else in wealth management has done before. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities.
Robinhood is looking to transform the wealth management business the same way we transformed self-directed investing. Our mission is to democratize finance for all, and that includes financial advisors and their clients.
Technology can knock down barriers, help advisors run more efficiently, and let them serve more clients without sacrificing service. That’s the opportunity we envision by bringing TradePMR and Robinhood together, and we’re excited to get to work building it.
We know we have to prove it, and that’s okay. We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time. We have even further to go. I like the challenge.