Trading app Robinhood has seen a 369% increase in the number of women using its services in the past year, according to COO Gretchen Howard. According to a report by Business Insider, women now make up 30% of its customer base.
Fast facts
- The result comes following Howard’s setting up of a task force to boost the firm’s female customer base when she joined the company last year. The team wrote detailed guides to the platform.
- Robinhood currently has 18 million active accounts, according to a recent IPO filing. That number implies that more than 5.4 million women are trading on Robinhood.
- Among those female users, 40% are investing in cryptocurrency. Howard told Business Insider that crypto was complex, saying: “It’s hard to understand. It’s very new, especially to people getting into investing for the first time. And it’s also stereotyped as a male-dominated space … to me it feels like, wow, we’ve enabled these women to trade crypto.”
- A Securities and Exchange Commission filing from last week shows that Robinhood paid US$15 million as a settlement to New York State Department of Financial Services in a case involving cybersecurity and anti-money laundering compliance.
- The news comes only a week after the platform was fined US$70 million by self-regulatory body the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to cover costs incurred by service outages and miscommunications with customers. The penalty is the largest handed down by FINRA to date.