Robinhood wants to be the Costco of finance

When Robinhood thinks about how it positions its Gold membership program, it doesn't just look at other brokerages or financial services apps for inspiration. It looks at companies like Costco.

"We want it to be the best deal in financial services," Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhood's vice president of product management for brokerage, told Finder in a wide-ranging interview about how the company builds products.

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“There are a lot of analogs we look at that are not in the financial services industry that we respect a lot when we think about Gold. We think about Costco as a model for what we want to do with Gold. You buy the Costco membership and you just know the moment you walk into a Costco, you’re getting the best deal and the best products, no matter what you’re buying.”

Amazon Prime, he added, is another reference point — a successful membership business alongside Netflix and Spotify. “When we think about what we aspire for Robinhood Gold to be, it’s kind of the best deal in financial services.”

It’s an unusual framing for a brokerage, and it helps explain not only why Robinhood looks the way it does today but also where it’s headed.

A different way of building

Fatehpuria joined Robinhood as an intern in 2016, three years after the company launched. At the time, Robinhood had about 40 people working out of a small office in Palo Alto. Nearly a decade later, he's overseeing a product surface that now spans commission-free stock trading, options, futures, retirement accounts, a credit card, and an AI assistant called Cortex. Most recently, the team launched agentic trading, which allows customers to authorize a third-party AI agent to execute trades in a dedicated, customer-funded Robinhood account.

For a company shipping that much, that fast, the natural question is how it all fits together. Open the Robinhood app today and the surface area is genuinely large — but the products feel intentional rather than bolted on. To Finder, which has reviewed Robinhood's app and products extensively over the years, the coherence is unusual for a fintech expanding this fast.

Fatehpuria said it’s intentional. The team’s first criterion for any new product is whether it would succeed on its own, independent of Robinhood’s existing customer base.

“Each product we have independently should be successful,” he explained. “If it has to ride the coattails of one of our existing products, it probably means that product in and of itself isn’t the best version of that product.”

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He pointed to the 3% IRA match and the Robinhood Gold credit card as examples — products he believes would attract customers regardless of whether the rest of Robinhood existed. Only after a product passes that bar does the team start thinking about how it fits into the larger ecosystem.

“A lot of products jump to the second step very early,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Okay, I’ve already got this huge base of users, I have a very successful product, now let me just add things onto it.’ One thing we’re very intentional about is: ‘Will these products be independently amazing?’”

A lesson learned

For all of Robinhood’s product velocity, not everything has landed. Asked about a lesson the team learned the hard way, Fatehpuria pointed to a recent example.

“A couple years ago, we had this bigger redesign of the Robinhood app that we had tried. It was modular — you could move little widgets around on the screen. We didn’t roll it out very widely, but it was a big overhaul, a big change from how it’s worked for 10 years. Customers didn’t love it. The numbers showed that it wasn’t really working.”

Robinhood took a different direction. Since then, the team’s approach to evolving the core app has shifted to something more incremental — tweaks to navigation, search improvements, performance upgrades — rather than sweeping redesigns.

“That was a big lesson for a lot of us,” Fatehpuria said.

The discipline of saying no

One of the more striking things about how Fatehpuria talks about product is his framing of restraint. Customers constantly ask Robinhood for new products, but not every request becomes a roadmap item.

“There’s a lot of things every year that we say no to,” he said. “For me, when we’re talking about the roadmap, there’s a distinction between someone saying they want something and it being the reason they would leave the platform. I would much rather be in a position where a customer is like, ‘I love what Robinhood has to offer, but they don’t quite offer the exact thing I need yet, but when they offer it, I’ll come to Robinhood,’ than be in the position where they’re saying Robinhood offers everything, but it’s not great.”

That approach can frustrate vocal customers. Fatehpuria acknowledged he sees the complaints — particularly from active traders. “I’ll look on Twitter and I’ll see the complaint. Someone’s a super active trader, and they’re like, ‘Why is Robinhood spending all this time building this other thing that doesn’t really matter to me?’ And the answer is because that matters to a lot of people. Maybe it doesn’t matter to that specific person.”

A feature most customers don’t know about

Asked what feature he thinks is underused, something Robinhood customers would get more value from if they knew it existed, Fatehpuria said the multiple brokerage accounts feature the company launched last year.

“It really helps you separate your strategies, which is a big thing for investors. I might have my actively traded portfolio on one side, and then my dividend, long-term investing portfolio. That feature really helps me separate the two, watch their PL [profit and loss] differently, see how each is independently doing.”

He said it’s underused partly because of discovery, partly because of education and partly because it requires some setup. “It takes a little bit of work because you have to open a new account. We try to make it as seamless as possible. But it’s really, really powerful. The customers who use it end up loving Robinhood a lot more.”

What’s next: AI as the interface

The conversation eventually turned to where Robinhood is headed, and Fatehpuria was direct about one thing: AI is core to the product’s future.

Cortex, Robinhood’s family of AI products, is approaching one million users, he said. The current lineup includes stock-level digests, portfolio-level digests and a conversational assistant that’s still being iterated on.

The hardest part of building AI in a financial-services context, Fatehpuria said, is correctness.

“Because we operate in financial services, the bar for correctness is very high. We’re not going to random websites and pulling information to answer questions. We’re carefully vetting the data vendors, carefully vetting what data is being used. The tolerance for errors is much lower, especially when it’s right in your brokerage account.”

And looking out a year? “You’re going to have to stay tuned for that for the most part,” he said. “But at a high level, we think about AI from how can it best assist active traders? Active traders are the ones consuming lots of data to come up with unique edge and unique insights that they can trade on. So that’s one angle. And the second, more medium-to-long-term angle we’ve been thinking about with AI is how do we meaningfully give you financial guidance?”

Why he’s still at Robinhood

Almost ten years at one company is rare in tech. Asked what keeps him excited, Fatehpuria pointed to the roadmap and his team.

“We have infinite ambition. The roadmap is packed. We always have things we’re saying no to. We’re not searching for things to say yes to, which is a sign that the roadmap is full. We have lots of products to build.”

He pointed to AI, private markets through Robinhood Ventures and other technology trends as areas the company is investing in. "There's just so many interesting things that we can do and are doing. In addition to that, the talent density at the company is very high. So I get a lot of enjoyment working with everyone here."

To make sure you get accurate and helpful information, this guide has been edited by Richard Laycock as part of our fact-checking process.

This story was produced by Finder and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.