If Americans love anything, we love our independence. We demanded our freedom from the clutches of Britain in 1776, and since then, mastering our own destinies has been the vibe. As the land of the free and the home of the brave, being an American means doing what we want, when we want, for as long as we would like, then cooling off with a Pabst Blue Ribbon whilst dragging on an American Spirit cigarette. But our expression of our right to live as we so choose is not confined to our beer/tobacco preferences, we support any company, no matter the industry, that empowers us to act on our own accord, and if we can capitalize on these ventures, they become all the more attractive to us.
Banking off the sex appeal of the American DIY economy, Robinhood was founded in 2013 with the idea of taking the experience of investing in the stock market and turning it into an easy-to-use smartphone app. Over the course of the last five years, the startup has built a base of over 6 million users by offering consumers commission-free stock trades, resulting in the company’s current $5.6 billion valuation. According to Forbes, Robinhood’s six million accounts roughly equate to tens of billions of dollars, in terms of individual customer assets. While I have yet to download the Robinhood app, several colleagues of mine have raved without end on the app’s user interface, and ease when investing. Robinhood’s success has allowed the company to threaten brokers like E*Trade and Charles Schwab, and they are showing no signs of slowing down.
On Thursday, Robinhood announced a new component of their business model, “Robinhood Checking & Saving,” which, staying true to the creative name, will see the company offer to its users free checking and savings accounts with a MasterCard debit card issues through Sutton Bank. According to several sources, Robinhood’s new accounts program will have no minimum balances, overdraft charges, or membership fees for its account holders. In addition to these incentives, Robinhood users who elect to store their money in these new accounts will earn 3% interest annually.
“Brick-and-mortar locations are costly. Our goal with this product was to build a completely digital experience so we can reduce our overhead so we can pass more of the value back to customers. Saving accounts in the US pay on average 0.09 percent and we all know the banks are making far more than that from the deposits. With Robinhood you earn 3 perfect of all of your money. Mental math is hard so if you look at the median US household that has about $8000 in liquid savings, they’d earn $240 a year.”
–Baiju Batt, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Robinhood
Robinhood’s CEO is spot on when he talks about how banks profit off the money we store in our checking and savings accounts. Banking institutions like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase use depositors’ money to pay for everything from loans for other customers to doling it out to other branches in need of quarter rolls for coin-operated laundry. Either way, lack of bank transparency is one of the motivating factors behind the success, albeit not recently, of decentralized currency.
The original intended purpose for cryptocurrency was to alleviate the trust-based model of depending on traditional banks to transact and safely store money. Blockchain technology allows consumers to access the ledger for every transaction they take part in, thus allowing for the transparency that big banks have yet to catch on to, or simply avoid.
The release of Robinhood-backed checking and savings accounts indicates that, similarly to decentralized currencies, consumer mistrust in traditional banking institutions is increasing. People want to know their money is secure, and, while its kept in a location, how the money is being used.
