- Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) UK approved Robinhood investment app broker license application
- Wander Rutgers will be leading the Robinhood UK branch
- Robinhood valued at $7.6 bln and currently have a total of 6 million traders registered on its platform
- There are over 2 million retail stock investors in the UK alone
August 08, 2019 | AtoZ Markets - US based zero fee stock trading app, Robinhood has received its FCA UK license to operate in the UK. Announcement came earlier on Thursday that the popular trading app company have been granted with broker authorization from the British financial services watchdog.
“Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for Robinhood, and we’re excited to take the first important step towards bringing our investing platform to customers in the U.K.,”
What does Robinhood do?
Robinhood is a stock trading app with zero commission fee. The platform enables retail or institutional investors to buy/sell a number of U.S. stocks. Now with their FCA license the company is likely to be able to offer other LSE listed shares as well.
However, it is also likely that Robinhood will be forced to open another EU based branch soon due to Brexit risks. We have already seen a number of FCA licensed Retail Forex brokers branching out to other EU countries, mostly to Cyprus. Meanwhile, Robinhood, based on our expectations is likely to be in touch with Germany’s BaFin as many other London based financial entities.
How many Brits are investing in stocks and shares?
The London Stock Exchange also known as LSE is the main stock exchange in the UK. LSE market capitalization is currently over USD $6 trillion, which makes LSE the third largest stock exchange in the world. There are as many as 3,000 companies’ stocks from over 60 countries listed on the exchange.
Statistics show that Brits are also interested and curios in stock market as well. There are over 2 million Brits have money invested in stocks and shares. This number does not include spread betting or CFDs investors.
Main Robinhood competitors
Robinhood’s main competitive advantage is its zero fee commission. The popular digital bank, Revolute is also entering commission-free trading race too. Being very popular among young European investors, from our perspective, Revolute will become the main competitor of Robinhood.