Vlad Tenev on CNBC - US squawk box on the street

Good to be here.

Yeah, first off, we love the Canadian people and the Canadian market. We've had an office in Toronto for quite some time and now is our opportunity to finally serve the market with great financial products which we think have been lacking for quite some time. I mean, whenever you see another product release in the US, we have the Canadian contingent saying, you know, when's Robinhood coming here? And we're happy to announce that the time is now. So, we've closed our acquisition of WonderFi, which is one of the largest and most established cryptocurrency platforms in Canada. They operate two services, Bitbuy and Coinsquare, and they'll be joining the Robinhood team. And yeah, we're excited. This also gets us to over 1 million customers outside the US. It's another step in our global expansion strategy to make Robinhood the leading global financial platform and not just in the US.

Yeah, first off, the Trump accounts. If you really think about what Robinhood is trying to do and our mission, we want to make everyone owners of this great American economy. And we think that by doing that, it's not just good for the individuals, but it'll also create a stronger economy and a healthier, more stable, more prosperous society. And Trump accounts allows us to do that from birth. So, it actually gives the power of equity ownership to newborns with a thousand dollar kickstart from the Department of Treasury. So, Robinhood serves as the sole initial trustee and broker of the Trump accounts, that app that you've been showing on the screen. Our engineers and design team have been working on that in close collaboration with BNY along with the national design studio from the administration and the Department of Treasury. So the goal really is to build the best product that the government has ever been associated with and you know, you can tell by the reception that I think we're on the right track so far. So on launch day, the app hit number one in finance and number four overall, climbing to number three overall. So it was the fastest growing app outside of AI, which is really cool. So off to a good start. Plenty more to do as we get ready for July 4th, but yeah, I think it's quite amazing.

Well, I think it depends on the time horizon. So, if you look over the past week, it's been quite strong. If you look in the past couple of years and you take a longer term view, the company's done tremendously well. You know, we've been growing market share, expanding our lines of business, our revenue streams. I think markets tend to have sometimes a short-term outlook on things. A lot of people are talking about what's going on today or tomorrow. We're building this business to be a long-term compounding business and we want Robinhood to be around for generations and growing market share and serving our customers. So, it's not always about, you know, what's happening to the ticker on any particular day for us.

Well, we've been diversifying our business anyway and that follows from our need to take care of our customers. You know, when we hear from customers, they want Robinhood to be on the cutting edge and to build new things that redefine the future of financial services. So, you saw last week for example, we're continuing that process. We are pioneering a category that we call agentic finance. So, we rolled out two things, the beginning of agentic finance, and really the idea is how can we actually give you the power of all these AI capabilities with the safety and security that you expect from a regulated trusted brokerage platform. So we have agentic trading which allows agents to trade on your behalf safely from your brokerage account and also an agentic credit card that gives the power of our 3% cashback credit card to your agents as well. So we're continuing to diversify. Also the core business continues to be strong. You know we're seeing equity participation and the natural compounding of our core business. Matter of fact, yesterday was our record equities trading day. So, we saw the most equities trading yesterday in our history. Also, the largest overnight trading session. This is for our 24-hour market offering. And I'd say, you know, to see that when, as you point out, crypto is in a little bit of a winter and we haven't quite seen the IPOs coming in that people are getting excited about just shows the natural compounding power of the core business.

Yeah. So we've been offering perpetual futures for quite some time in Europe. So you might remember we acquired a crypto exchange, one of the longest continuously running crypto exchanges in the world, Bitstamp, and so we launched perpetual futures about a year ago. So bringing those to the US is obviously something that's very, very attractive. Now I think the US also has established traditional futures markets which we've been offering. So I think it's a positive development. You know, our US customers should have access to these innovative financial instruments without having to rely on unregulated offshore platforms where they VPN in to get access to it. So yeah, as it develops, you should see the products improve and of course we'll be looking to continue to add everything that our customers want in a safe way.

Always a pleasure.