Bernstein: Robinhood Drops Two Agentic Products, Reveals Trump Account Sole Custody Win, and Eyes Prediction Market Expansion to Institutions and Overseas
Bernstein 42nd Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, May 27, 2026 — CFO Shiv Verma lays out a product roadmap that goes well beyond trading
Robinhood's CFO Shiv Verma used his appearance at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference to announce two new agentic products, confirm that Robinhood is the sole custodian for the government's new Trump accounts, and signal that its prediction markets business is about to make a significant leap toward institutional and international audiences. For a company sitting at roughly $350 billion in platform assets against a $20 trillion-plus U.S. brokerage addressable market, the pace of product expansion is notable — and the financial discipline underpinning it is increasingly hard to dismiss.
Agentic Trading and Agentic Commerce: The First Two of Many
The headline announcement on the day was a pair of agentic products, both built on the Model Context Protocol framework. The first, Agentic Trading, allows technically sophisticated users to connect a dedicated brokerage account directly to their preferred large language model — Claude, Codex, or otherwise — and execute trades, build screeners, or construct portfolios through natural language instructions. The second, Agentic Commerce, ties a virtual credit card to an AI agent with a defined spending limit, letting users automate purchases ranging from sneaker drops to restaurant reservations.
Verma was careful to frame the current release as a developer and AI-native product, not a mass-market one. "This is not in the app. You have to actually physically connect through the MCP," he said. The broader rollout, aimed at less technical users, is planned for later in the year across a series of product events including a UK showcase in July and an active trader conference in the fall.
The regulatory positioning is deliberate. Because the user retains intent and approves each action, the product sits comfortably under Reg BI rather than the more complex registered investment adviser framework. On the question of whether agents will eventually displace human financial advisers, Verma pushed back, arguing the more valuable near-term application is augmenting RIAs rather than replacing them. "What they want to spend their time doing is talking to customers, meeting their clients, more sales focused, relationship driven. They don't want to do the back office stuff, which is most of what they spend their time on. If you can have agents help them in a regulated way, that is really powerful."
Trump Accounts: Sole Custodian, Five Million Sign-Ups Before Launch
Verma confirmed that Robinhood is the sole custodian for the new federally created Trump accounts, with the product set to go live the following day. More than five million people had already signed up at the time of the conference, a meaningful top-of-funnel event for a company that is explicitly trying to engage younger and first-time investors. The custodial account angle fits squarely into Robinhood's stated strategy of building products for its aging core demographic — average customer age has moved from 28 to 36 since Verma joined — whose financial needs now include accounts for children, trust structures, mortgages, and fuller banking relationships.
AI Productivity: Nine Figures in Savings, 50% Jump in Code Velocity
Verma reiterated and expanded on figures first shared at the Q1 earnings call. Roughly 75% of customer service tickets are now resolved through AI, and the company has generated over nine figures in software development cost savings. More telling is the commit velocity metric — a measure of code output — which Verma said is up 50% since the start of last year. He attributed this not just to tooling but to organizational culture and early adoption. "When enterprise ChatGPT came out in 2022, Vlad was on the phone with them the first weekend — we were an early adopter. Same when Opus came out."
The marketing example Verma offered is illustrative of the operational leverage available. A full advertising campaign — creative concept, AI-generated video with avatar actors, voiceover via ElevenLabs, post-production, and channel distribution — was completed in roughly four hours. The same process previously took two to three weeks. The team then produced 100 variants of that ad in a single afternoon for A/B testing. Verma characterized this as the result of building an internal AI harness — a proprietary interface that abstracts authentication, security profiles, and tool access — so that non-technical employees can interact with the full stack without friction.
Prediction Markets: From One Million to 1.5 Million Users, Institutional Ambitions Coming Into View
Event contracts, which Robinhood launched roughly 20 months ago through a joint venture with Susquehanna on a DCM exchange it subsequently acquired, have now been used by 1.5 million customers, up from the one million figure disclosed at Q1 earnings. Sports contracts dominate at roughly 85% of volume, consistent with broader industry data, but Verma pointed to Polymarket's experience overseas — where non-sports contracts make up the majority of volume — as evidence that financial and other contract categories will find traction in time.
The more consequential development is the vertical integration of the exchange itself. "When we control the entire piece, there's a lot of things you can do," Verma said. The current pricing structure, where the customer pays $0.02 per contract split evenly between Robinhood and the exchange, will change. Verma was explicit: "You should expect that the $0.02 per contract is not going to stay — we're going to come out with a more innovative pricing that makes sure it addresses some of the customer pain points and will also be one of the best pricing on the market." The company plans to use the incremental economics from vertical integration to reprice aggressively, a playbook borrowed from its own history in equities and options.
Beyond retail, Verma noted the company is already receiving inbound inquiries from other designated contract markets looking to migrate off existing third-party exchanges onto Robinhood's infrastructure. International licensing conversations are also underway. The implication is that what has been a consumer-facing product could evolve into a B2B exchange business with global reach — a development that is not yet reflected in most models of the company.
Regulatory clarity on financial KPI contracts — whether earnings and revenue event contracts constitute SEC-regulated securities swaps or CFTC event contracts — remains the primary bottleneck on the most commercially interesting product extensions. Verma expressed confidence the two agencies would resolve this relatively soon, at which point Robinhood would list financial contracts on individual company pages alongside the underlying equity.
Private Markets: $1.5 Billion Fund I, Confidential Filing for Fund II
Robinhood Ventures Fund I, structured as a 40 Act closed-end fund to provide daily liquidity and avoid accredited investor requirements, has reached a $1.5 billion market cap with 150,000 customer participants. The portfolio includes OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks. A confidential SEC filing for Fund II is already underway. Verma's long-term framing — Robinhood as the largest venture capital firm in the world — is aspirational, but the structural logic is coherent: a 40 Act wrapper solves the liquidity and accreditation problems that have historically kept retail investors out of private markets, and Robinhood's distribution is unmatched among retail platforms.
Overseas, tokenization handles the same access problem under MiFID licenses in Europe, where the company has already tokenized two private stocks in addition to public equities. In the US, where tokenization of securities remains legally ambiguous, the 40 Act structure is the operative vehicle for now.
Take Rates, Net Interest Income, and Near-Term Trends
On the trading revenue outlook, Verma confirmed that crypto take rates remain approximately 7 to 8 basis points below Q1 levels quarter-to-date as of the conference date, with the casual trader cohort largely sidelined and institutional and active traders holding their ground. Robinhood recently raised its casual tier rate from 85 to 95 basis points. Options take rates have stabilized after a Q1 dip driven by a mix shift toward ETFs rather than single-name stocks, with volumes described as healthy — April was the company's second-highest trading month on record, and May was off to a strong start.
On net interest income, the margin loan book has grown to over $18 billion, sweep deposits remain around $30 billion, and customer opt-in rates for securities lending are approximately 25% of accounts and 50% of assets. The soft spot is the special rebate rate, which is depressed by low IPO activity. Verma framed a recovery in large-cap IPOs — several of which have filed or are rumored to have filed — as a "coiled spring" for the business, given that IPO stocks are prototypically high-volatility, low-float names that generate elevated securities lending demand.
Capital Allocation: $350 Million in Buybacks Year-to-Date, $6 Billion Cash, No Leverage
The $1.5 billion share repurchase program announced earlier this year is running ahead of the originally communicated two-to-three year pace. Verma updated the year-to-date figure to approximately $350 million, up from the $300 million disclosed at Q1 earnings. The company bought back $250 million of stock in Q1 alone during the period of peak market volatility. With roughly $6 billion in cash, $3 to $4 billion in undrawn credit facilities, and no debt, the balance sheet is structured to be opportunistic. Verma stated the company's North Star financial metric explicitly: growing free cash flow per share and earnings per share over time, which he described as the defining characteristic of every company that has reached a $1 trillion valuation.
Competitive Position and the Path to Wallet Share
On the competitive question — how Robinhood sustains differentiation as larger incumbents replicate its multi-asset strategy — Verma's answer was less about moats and more about velocity. "You have to keep pushing the boundaries," he said, citing agentic products and MCPs as the current frontier. He acknowledged directly that the space is not winner-take-all but argued Robinhood is one of a small number of platforms with a credible claim to the financial super-app position. The asset-side starting point, he argued, is structurally different from platforms that lead with lending: "Customers trust you with their assets, their deposits. They're very easy to give someone. It's very hard to get it back."
Account growth, currently running at 7% to 10% organically with essentially no marketing spend, is now a deliberate focus. New vectors include custodial accounts, the Trump account custody win, decoupled banking onboarding for younger users, and a gradual reallocation of promotional dollars toward net funded account growth — though Verma was clear that the 20% annual net deposit growth target remains the primary financial objective and is not being traded away for subscriber metrics.