Robinhood Markets, Inc. Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Thank you to everyone for joining Robinhood's Q2 2025 earnings call, whether you're tuning into the live stream at home or here with us in person. With us today are Chairman and CEO Vlad Tenev; CFO Jason Warnick; and VP of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations Chris Koegel. Vlad and Jason will offer opening remarks and then open the call to Q&A. During the Q&A portion of the call, we will answer questions from institutional research analysts, and we will also answer questions from finance content creators who may hold an ownership position in Robinhood. As a reminder, today's call will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from our current expectations, and we may not provide updates unless legally required. Potential risk factors that could cause differences, including regulatory developments that we continue to monitor, are described in the press release we issued today, the earnings presentation, and in our SEC filings, all of which can be found at investors.robinhood.com. Today's discussion will also include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the GAAP measures we consider most directly comparable can be found in the earnings presentation. With that, please welcome Vlad and Jason.

All right. Greetings and salutations. It's great to see everyone today. We're back in New York City at the NASDAQ where we had Investor Day in December. I see some familiar faces, and it's great to have institutional analysts and finance content creators with us today. So that's Robinhood's live audience for the first time, always innovating across every aspect of the business, and the earnings are no exception. Let's get right into it. In the second quarter, we really kept raising the bar with industry-leading product velocity across our three focus areas: #1 in active traders, #1 in wallet share for the next generation, and the #1 global financial ecosystem. Our active trader offering just keeps leveling up, with record trading volumes in Q2 across equities, options, prediction markets, index options, and futures. Index options volumes grew by 60% from Q1, and event contracts more than doubled from Q1 to nearly 1 billion in Q2. These results were driven by relentless innovation, including new tooling capabilities for mobile Legend and the team's rapidly shipping updates. Cortex for Gold members started with stock digest, which has been used by hundreds of thousands of our customers. After three great product events so far this year, we're hosting the second annual HOOD Summit for active traders, which is going to be an event in Las Vegas in just a few weeks, and it’s going to be much bigger than last year. Average assets per funded customer were over $10,000 for the first time, nearly doubling from a year ago! We thought Robinhood would always be in the low single-digit thousands per account, but we just keep compounding, and that assets per customer keeps marching upward. Retirement assets are now over $20 billion, having more than doubled in the past year. We're excited to launch Robinhood Banking in the fall, so customers can bring even more of their assets to Robinhood. We've been pushing even harder in the global financial ecosystem, recently expanding our European offering to 30 countries, serving over 400 million people including stock tokens, which I think tokenization is the biggest innovation in capital markets in over a decade. Stock tokens will do for stocks what stablecoin did for fiat currencies. The U.S. is not far behind, and we're making incredible progress. Revenue is up 45% year-over-year to nearly $1 billion. The third highest quarter of net deposits ever and Gold subscribers are up to a record 3.5 million, with the Gold team doing an exceptional job. We feel great about Q2 and the results. I'll turn it over to you, Jason, to talk about financials before taking some Q&A.

Sounds good. Thanks, Vlad. Q2 was another great quarter as we drove market share gains, closed the acquisition of Bitstamp, and remained disciplined on expenses. As a result, we grew revenues 45% year-over-year, drove 81% incremental adjusted EBITDA margins, and doubled EPS from a year ago. Revenues were $989 million, driven by strong business growth. Trade volumes were up double to triple digits across all categories. In Q2, contract volumes were 11 million for futures, 17 million for index options, and nearly 1 billion for prediction markets. Interest-earning assets were up over 50%, driven by cash sweep, margin, and strong securities lending activity. We've stayed disciplined on expenses; adjusted OpEx and SBC was up just 6% year-over-year, leading to 56% adjusted EBITDA margins. As we enter Q3, we're off to a fast start in July. Net deposits are around $6 billion. Equity and options trading volumes are setting new monthly records, and crypto volumes for both Robinhood and Bitstamp are at 6-month highs. The momentum is strong entering the second half of the year, and we remain focused on driving another year of profitable growth in 2025. With that, Chris, let's turn to Q&A.

All right. Thank you, Jason. For the Q&A session, we will start by answering two top questions from shareholders on Say Technologies ranked by the number of votes. We passed over questions that we already addressed on this call or in prior quarters and grouped together questions that shared a common theme. After the Say questions, we'll turn to questions from our live audience. The first question is from Tarun Kay, who asks, when will Robinhood Banking be broadly available for customers?

Yes, I'll field that one. Thanks for the question, Tarun. As a reminder, we announced Robinhood Banking at our Lost City of Gold event in San Francisco a couple of months ago. The idea behind Robinhood Banking is to deliver the private banking experience, which has typically been high-net-worth, in digital form to the mass market. We've rolled it out internally, and it's looking really good, so it's still on track for rollout to customers later in the quarter.

I'll start, and Vlad, feel free to jump in. As we've said over time, we want to be the place to custody all of our customers' assets and process all of their financial transactions, and lending plays right into this. You may have seen that through a partnership with Sage Home Loans, Gold members now have access to attractive rates on mortgages. We're also already providing some forms of credit. We've got the Gold Card and margin, and over time, our ambitions across all transaction types continue to grow.

All right. Thank you, Jason. We're going to now go to questions from our live audience, and I'll start with Steven Chubak from Wolfe Securities. Let's get him a mic.

Jason, Vlad, thanks so much for hosting this event. Maybe to start on net deposit momentum because in the second quarter, we did see a bit of a moderation. I know Steve Quirk spoke to some adjustments to promotional activity. You launched some promotions alongside the crypto event and we're seeing a re-acceleration in net deposits in July. I wanted to get a better sense of how the strategy is evolving around net deposits and promotional activity more specifically.

Yes. We love the promotions. Customers love these promotions. When we launch these promotions, we see larger balances from customers, and that's showing up in our overall averages. Promotions are part of our playbook. We intend to keep doing it and measure the economics on all of these promotions.

Yes. Maybe I would just say two things. One is net deposits do have some volatility driven by traders. If the market is moving in crypto or in other asset classes in a particular direction, traders deposit money to take advantage of those opportunities. But if you smooth out the inter-quarter, the trajectory for net deposits has been quite strong. Continued customer engagement, growth in new products, and expansion into banking all suggest that net deposits will grow.

Thanks, guys. Amazing quarter, as always. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the long-term strategic opportunities with private tokenization of private assets and some of the feedback you're getting from the market on all these great announcements?

The To Catch a Token event exceeded expectations, watched over 25 million times. It was a blueprint to the rest of the world of what can happen with regulatory clarity around crypto assets. Customers want tokenization in Europe and the U.S. as well. We're working to create a product that's usable in both markets.

The event highlighted our product velocity. We've had numerous successful customer events. In September, we have one for active traders.

Curious whether your mindset has changed on applying for banking licenses, especially given some recent rollouts.

We're always looking at the landscape and making decisions about opportunities. We applied for a national bank charter in 2019 to get into high-yield products. Since then, the partnership ecosystem around banking improved, allowing us to produce better savings product through partnerships. We're always open to reevaluating banking charters but have found capabilities available through partnerships thus far.

Congrats on a great quarter and innovating on the live event experience for earnings. How are you protecting the business from cyclicality faced with market volatility?

We're far more diversified compared to a few years ago. The way we manage our business and being lean positions us to navigate cyclicality effectively.

In 2021, we were fragile during the retail boom, but we've diversified in a high-rate environment, which gives us confidence in our ability to navigate future challenges.

How do you see the regulatory path for tokenization of equity in the U.S. playing out?

The opportunity in the U.S. for tokenization is interesting. We're working with regulators to make this possible, aiming to unlock opportunities for private markets and real-world assets, which have not been accessible up until now.

I'd love to ask about securities lending ramping nicely this quarter. Can you frame out the opportunity there?

June was a record for us, and July is equally as strong, with lots of customers onboarding and adding assets into our fully paid programs. We expect continued momentum.

Can you talk about crypto monetization and effects from smart exchange routing?

Customers have two ways to engage with crypto trading at Robinhood. First is our market maker method where we get a rebate, and second is direct with exchanges via smart exchange routing. We're seeing more competitive rates through these channels.

Can you elaborate on your credit card offering? Are you seeing the economics you'd like?

We like what we're seeing on the credit card economics. The book is performing well, and we're gaining confidence.

Balances take a little time to increase on the revolve, hence the lag in growth with new cardholders.

Could you preview more on the Robinhood Chain and its advantages for real-world assets?

The Robinhood Chain offers a captive audience of over 25 million customers in the U.S. and is focused on tokenizing real-world assets, a unique opportunity that we don't believe others are tackling directly.

Could you elaborate on the businesses moving into the $50 million range and potential for staking?

Several businesses are moving up on the revenue run rate. TradePMR, Bitstamp, and prediction markets are scaling well.

How do you think about the advantages of your SPV contract model versus others?

Every transaction with our tokens has a corresponding transaction in the traditional market to minimize risks of de-pegging. This is designed for customer confidence, and we are gearing up for Phase 2 and Phase 3 of our rollout.

I wanted to follow up on the benefits of tokenized equities. How do you ensure competitive execution costs?

The early feedback from our European offering is that customers love the value on stock tokens. We aim to pass back full value to customers, which has led to high satisfaction.

Tokenized stocks eventually invite a world of fee compression in crypto?

I don't expect tokenization to change the pricing dynamic for spot crypto assets. Customers care more about exposure than the underlying mechanism.

What percentage of crypto assets are currently being staked, and how do you think about growing that?

We've got about $6 billion of stakeable assets, and the majority are in areas where staking is allowed. Customers have responded quickly, and we see growth potential.

Do you still think there are opportunities for bolt-ons to add new product capability?

Our corp dev team is actively looking at opportunities continuously, and we still see potential for acquisitions that can help accelerate our strategy.

We feel we've done a nice job selecting companies that accelerate our roadmap and ensure value for shareholders.

All right. The next question is from Matt O'Neill at FT Partners.

Thank you again for listening to our earnings call. We hope this was informative but also fun. Watch out for HOOD Summit in Las Vegas in the next few weeks, where innovation will continue.

Thanks so much.