Robinhood delays UK launch amid pandemic popularity
Commission-free stock trading app Robinhood has pushed back its UK launch date after failing to meet its initial timeframe.
The tech giant told customers on its UK waitlist today that it will now miss its original goal of a launch in early 2020, but committed to becoming available before the end of this year.
“Our initial goal was to launch in early 2020, and we’re sorry not to have met that. We’re working hard behind the scenes to give you access as quickly as possible,” the firm wrote in an email, seen by City PM
“Robinhood remains committed to bringing commission-free investing to the UK in 2020. We want to be sure it’s the right moment for us to introduce Robinhood to you.”
The scaleup, which is based in California and valued at $8.3bn, has more than 13m users. It has won favour with Wall Street and millennials alike, with the average user age of 31.
The coronavirus pandemic and resulting stock market volatility has proved fruitful for Robinhood, which said it gained a record 3m new customers in the first quarter of 2020 alone.
However its popularity has also led to the platform being beset by outages at crucial trading times. The tech firm was hit by three outages in two weeks as markets boiled over in March, with one lasting as long as 17 hours.
Robinhood raised a series F funding round of $280m last month to help bolster its operations, led by Silicon Valley stalwart Sequoia Capital. It also raked in $60m in revenue in March — three times that of the month before, according to Bloomberg.
In the UK the tech firm mainly faces competition from incumbent offerings and fellow startups such as Freetrade, though Robinhood dwarfs them in size.
Freetrade itself was the subject of controversy earlier this year, after a City PM investigation revealed it had built a reputation among its staff for toxic workplace culture.
A Robinhood spokesperson declined to provide further details on the reason behind its UK launch delay.