Robinhood hopes for third time lucky in the UK with high interest offers and 24-hour a day trading
Robinhood, the trading app that took the United States by storm during the pandemic lockdowns, is having another go at cracking the UK market.
The company, a key beneficiary of the craze in so-called “meme” stocks which took hold in 2020 and 2021, first announced plans for a UK launch in 2020.
On that occasion, having opened a waiting list for would-be clients in 2019 that reportedly attracted 300,000 potential customers, it shelved plans in order to concentrate on its home US market following an explosion of interest there.
More recently, in August last year, it sought to buy Ziglu, a UK-based cryptocurrency trading app, for $170m only for the deal to fall through.
It will now be hoping that it is third time lucky.
A compelling offer in a competitive market
The offer for would-be customers is pretty compelling but, with the likes of Freetrade, eToro, Trading 212 and Revolut all now offering commission-free share trading, it needs to be.
Robinhood is offering commission-free trading of more than 6,000 US-listed stocks and ADRs (American Depository Receipts) with no foreign exchange fees and customers will be able to trade around the clock and out of hours.
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s co-founder and chief executive, points out that, during the recent turmoil at OpenAI, a lot of customers and market participants had been tweeting screenshots from Robinhood of the share price of Microsoft – a major investor in the AI business and which offered its ousted (and later reinstated) chief executive, Sam Altman, a job almost immediately.
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Vladimir Tenev said that, over time, the ability to trade UK and European stocks on the Robinhood would grow.
He told Sky News: “We are offering those US stocks 24 hours a day, five days a week through our 24 hour market, we became the first major broker in the US to offer round the clock trading of individual named stocks.
“That’s a capability that you won’t find elsewhere.”
He said that, over time, the ability to trade UK and European stocks on the platform would become available.
But perhaps the kicker is that the business will be offering customers an interest rate of 5% on any uninvested cash in their brokerage account.
That is something Mr Tenev clearly hopes will lure customers away not only from commission-free trading rivals – most of whom are relative upstarts in the industry – but also some sector’s established big guns such as Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell and Interactive Investor, which is owned by the fund manager Abrdn.
It is also worth noting that Robinhood only offers an interest rate of that magnitude to its premium customers in the US.
The big profit question
One big question here is how Robinhood will be able to offer a proposition like this to UK customers and remain profitable.
In the US, it can offer commission-free trading by accepting payments from market-makers – the market professionals who quote two-way prices at which they will either buy or sell a security – to execute the trades made by its customers.
But this practice, known as “payment for order flow”, is not allowed in the UK.
Mr Tenev’s response is that payment for order flow now only accounts for a small portion of Robinhood’s revenues in the US – perhaps because some US regulators have been pondering about the desirability of the practice.
He said: “If you look at Robinhood’s business, actually, in the past couple of quarters, we’ve diversified it tremendously.
“More than half of our revenue comes from net interest. And that’s through a number of offerings, we collect a small spread on the cash, even though we do offer 5% interest.
“We offer stock lending, which shares interest generated by stocks, customers are holding in their account with customers, but also generates revenue for the firm. So we’ve continued to diversify. And equity is payment for order flow, which you mentioned, is right around 5% of our revenue.
“And we’ve been growing our revenues. So what we aim to do is, again, offer the best economics to our customers and make it clear to customers that they’re getting an unbelievable value proposition and experience with Robinhood.
“But of course, the business is sustainable. And we might operate at thinner margins than the incumbents. But the business still makes money. We’ve demonstrated that and we’re continuing to diversify it over time.”
Will the UK be enthusiastic about stock trading?
Another big question is whether the UK will ever be as enthusiastic about stock trading as in the US.
Even there, transaction volumes have slipped in recent months as Americans have returned to the office, sporting events – a rival attraction for those interested in punting rather than investing – have resumed and the savings built up by households during the lockdowns have been run down.
If Robinhood can get Britons buying shares actively again, it will be thanked by Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, who recently announced plans for a possible offer of the government’s remaining shares in NatWest with the words “it’s time to get Sid investing again”, a reference to the successful “Tell Sid” advertising campaign in 1986 that persuaded more than 1.5 million people to invest in shares of British Gas when it was privatised by Margaret Thatcher’s government.
Robinhood has been criticised in the US for encouraging the “gamification” of trading. The criticism reached a peak after a 20-year old Robinhood customer killed himself in June 2020 after running up losses of $750,000 on the options market.
Mr Tenev insists Robinhood has learned from the experience. The app now includes many more educational resources aimed at helping clients invest more knowledgably and to make more informed decisions.
Regulators will be watching closely, though, to ensure that investors are not being encouraged to take reckless risks.
An arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, triggered by recent panic over Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, risks amplifying the existential dangers of superintelligence, according to one of the “godfathers” of AI.
Canadian machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, author of the first International AI Safety Report to be presented at an international AI summit in Paris next week, warns unchecked investment in computational power for AI without oversight is dangerous.
“The effort is going into who’s going to win the race, rather than how do we make sure we are not going to build something that blows up in our face,” Mr Bengio says.
He warns that military and economic races “result in cutting corners on ethics, cutting corners on responsibility and on safety. It’s unavoidable”.
Mr Bengio worked on neural networks and machine learning, the software architecture that underpins modern AI models.
He is in London, along with other AI pioneers to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the most prestigious global award for engineering, in recognition of AI and its potential.
He’s enthusiastic about its benefits for society, but the pivot away from AI regulation by Donald Trump‘s White House and frantic competition among big tech companies for more powerful AI models is a worrying shift.
‘Superhuman systems becoming more powerful’
“We are building systems that are more and more powerful; becoming superhuman in some dimensions,” he says.
“As these systems become more powerful, they also become extraordinarily more valuable, economically speaking.
“So the magnitude of, ‘wow, this is going to make me a lot of money’ is motivating a lot of people. And of course, when you want to sell products, you don’t want to talk about the risks.”
But not all the “godfathers” of AI are so concerned.
Take Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, also in London to share in the QEPrize.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI scientist
“We have been deluded into thinking that large language models are intelligent, but really, they’re not,” he says.
“We don’t have machines that are nearly as smart as a house cat, in terms of understanding the physical world.”
Within three to five years, Mr LeCun predicts, AI will have some aspects of human-level intelligence. Robots, for example, that can perform tasks they’ve not been programmed or trained to do.
Read more:
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But, he argues, rather than make the world less safe, open-source AI models such as DeepSeek – a chatbot developed by a Chinese company that rivals the best of America’s big tech with a tenth of the computing power – demonstrates no one will dominate for long.
“If the US decides to clam up when it comes to AI for geopolitical reasons, or, commercial reasons, then you’ll have innovation someplace else in the world. DeepSeek showed that,” he says.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering prize is awarded each year to engineers whose discoveries have, or promise to have, the greatest impact on the world.
Previous recipients include the pioneers of photovoltaic cells in solar panels, wind turbine technology and neodymium magnets found in hard drives, and electric motors.
Science minister Lord Vallance, who chairs the QEPrize foundation, says he is alert to the potential risks of AI.
Organisations such as the UK’s new AI Safety Institute are designed to foresee and prevent the potential harms AI “human-like” intelligence might bring.
Science minister Lord Vallance
But he is less concerned about one nation or company having a monopoly on AI.
“I think what we’ve seen in the last few weeks is it’s much more likely that we’re going to have many companies in this space, and the idea of single-point dominance is rather unlikely,” he says.
The Treasury Select Committee has sent a formal notice to HM Revenue & Customs demanding answers to critical questions about how it has been enforcing trade sanctions on Russia, following a Sky News investigation into the government department.
Last month Sky News reported that while HMRC had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since 2022, it would not name the firms sanctioned or provide any further detail on what they did wrong. HMRC also admitted it had no idea how many investigations it was currently carrying out into sanction-breaking.
The admissions raised questions about the robustness of Britain’s trade sanctions regime, described by government ministers as the toughest in British history.
Money blog: Now we know why Guinness tastes worse in the UK
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How robust are UK-Russia sanctions?
While the UK has introduced rules preventing the export of certain goods to Russia, banned items are still flowing into the country via third countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Some suspect that part of the reason these flows continue is that HMRC is not enforcing the rules as robustly as it could be.
Following Sky News’ investigation, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee (TSC), Dame Meg Hiller, has written a letter to the chief executive of HMRC, Sir Jim Harra, with 10 questions about HMRC’s conduct in the enforcement of sanctions.
Among the questions, the TSC chair asks: “Why doesn’t HMRC publish information on breaches in sanctions in a similar way to the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), which gives the details of the company, how it breached sanctions and the amount of penalty issued?”
Many other countries around the world – most notably the United States – routinely “name and shame” those who break sanctions, in part as a deterrent and in part to inform other businesses about what it takes to break the rules. But HMRC instead protects the privacy of those who break sanctions.
The TSC has been scrutinising the sanctions regime in recent months, examining loopholes in the legislation and its enforcement. HMRC has been asked to respond to the letter by 17 February.
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