How the neobroker’s content contributes to its success 

With UK users slowly being onboarded onto Robinhood’s first international offering, it felt like the right time to look under “the hood” and examine how the neobroker uses content to drive investor engagement – and how you can do the same.  

How did we get here? 

Since its launch in 2013, neobroker Robinhood has been strictly Stateside, but now British retail investors (or at least those on the waiting list) can finally join the roughly 10 million active users on the platform. 

This is a tried and tested strategy for Robinhood: initial word-of-mouth hype saw hundreds of thousands of people join the waiting list when the platform first launched in the US. The genius part was that the only way to jump the queue was by referring your friends (grabbing yourself a free $10 stock in the process). By the time it went live on the App Store, there were a million budding investors on the waitlist. And before it went public in 2021, 80% of its users came via the referral program. 

The UK launch won’t be that simple. In 2013, zero-commission trades and super-low minimum investments were a world first. Now they’re commonplace. Today, that “first mover advantage” simply isn’t there. 

In fairness, that advantage hasn't been there in the US for a long time either, and Robinhood is still riding high. So it’s doing something right. That thing, we think, is content, which helps investors – educating and engaging them so they stick around. 

How do they do it? 

Simple, consistent (and enjoyable) content

When the Robinhood app was being designed, co-founder Baju Baht was laser-focused on making it “dead simple” to use. Even as the product has expanded, that approach has stayed the same. First-time users are given clear explanations for each step: these are all well signposted but can be easily bypassed by experienced investors looking to get onto the platform quickly. The app also provides recommendations on investments, alongside an explanation of what the investment involves. 

This is a theme that carries on throughout all of Robinhood’s content in-app and out. And there’s a lot of it: as Robinhood has scaled over the last decade, so has the amount of content it releases. Across the app, website, socials, email and more, it releases market updates, newsletters, podcasts, and a library of educational resources, all written in plain language that modern retail investors actually want to read. 

How you can do the same (and how Finimize can help)

It’s hard enough getting started with content, let alone scaling it to a multichannel operation. It costs time and money and takes a lot of trial and error to find a winning formula. Fortunately, we’ve already cracked it. 

We publish conversational, jargon-free content written (before being released as bitesize podcasts too) by world-class analysts from top-tier institutions– and we do it at scale. In a single month, we produced 265 content pieces for LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. We speak directly to our million-strong community every day across our free and paid channels and reach 40 million beyond that through partner channels, helping us drive a social-media-like level of engagement with some 50% of our monthly users engaging with our content every week and our daily newsletter open rates exceeding 50%. 

By partnering with Finimize, you can access this multichannel, multiformat content, bring it into your environment and tailor it for your customers. 

On-the-job learning 

For new users, there’s an educational video-game approach to the app, where you take action with small, low-stake investments to get used to the platform. In that, bite-sized content is part of an overall journey towards investing and taking action. For example, educational quizzes will reward users with small amounts of crypto or stocks.  

For more experienced investors, there’s live data and market news, as well as in-app third-party content from trusted, reputable sources.

This approach is being rolled out in the UK version too, Jordan Sinclair, Robinhood’s UK president, recently explained to TechCrunch. “This is all about putting it in one place for a customer, so they can facilitate all of that research and all that information before they make trades and to guide their investment strategy going forward,” Sinclair said. 

How you can do the same (and how Finimize can help)

If you want investors to stick around, education is key: 74% of investors we spoke to say they would probably invest more if investment content were easier to find. A UK study from Charles Stanley found that the main reasons people stop investing are concerns about market volatility and, unsurprisingly, because their investments aren’t performing as well as they wanted. The same study found that 26% admit they don’t understand the different levels of risk and how to minimize their chances of losing money. 

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You can use our evergreen content library to plug that gap, and support investors as their knowledge improves. Create data-driven journeys for your users, based on existing customer profile data to make sure they’re not just educated, informed, and empowered, but that they stick around too. And it works: 86% of our million-strong community invest, while almost 30% started investing thanks to Finimize. 

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Multi-channel, media-grade engagement 

While the ultimate aim of Robinhood is to keep users on the platform, it’s putting a lot of effort into its external content. For straight-up financial education, there’s Robinhood Learn, an online collection of beginners' guides, feature tutorials, and an extensive financial dictionary. 

And then there’s  Snacks, the company’s digestible daily newsletter. Part of its popularity is thanks to the fact that anyone who joins Robinhood is automatically subscribed to Snacks and receives it daily unless they unsubscribe. 

This multi-channel approach allows Robinhood to better inform their current investors, and acquire new ones. 

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How you can do the same (and how Finimize can help)

With the fast-paced nature of markets, regular content that investors can consume as part of their daily and weekly routines can quickly add a lot of value. 

Our organically built daily newsletter, for example, has over 850,000 subscribers, a 52% open rate and was designed to be read over your morning coffee or commute. Even our deep-dive content only takes between three and eight minutes to read. 

As a result, our content is unique in its ability to match engagement with efficiency, and gets more engagement than traditional media. In 2023, Finimize content was consumed 142 million times through our directly owned channels.

Graduate top of the class with Finimize

Robinhood and platforms like it are using content to pull away from the rest of the class. So whether you’re a new platform looking to close the gap or an existing player keen to surge ahead from any new arrivals in town, we can help you achieve that with just a phone call and a few button presses.

We pair world-class analysts with expert editors. They’re tuned in to the conversations that modern retail investors really care about, collecting and analyzing key data, adapting to feedback, and responding to market developments as they happen. 

The end result is a library of hyper-relevant, insightful and accessible content that you can use to scale efficiently. Today, over 40 million investors have access to this content via our partners’ channels with solutions such as: 

Finimize Select: Self-Serve from our library to pull in chosen content as and when you need it. 

Finimize Connect: Automatically deliver relevant content from our library through your channels using our API.

Get in touch to find out how partnering with Finimize can help your financial brand move to the top of the class.