Robinhood CEO: "Gen Z Is the Most Retirement-Savvy Generation Ever" | Vlad Tenev

**Vlad Tenev** (0:00)
Gen Z are the most retirement-savvy and long-term-investment-savvy generation we've ever had.

**Ryan** (0:06)
Wait, what?

**Vlad Tenev** (0:07)
Yeah, yeah. They're opening retirement accounts at earlier ages than any generation in the past. I think the average age of Gen Z opening a retirement account at that point was 19 So it might have gone up since then, but it's probably like early 20s. When you compare it to the light-year-old, they're at 25

**David** (0:30)
Bankless Nation, we are once again joined by Vlad Tenev, the founder and CEO of Robinhood. Vlad, welcome back to Bankless.

**Vlad Tenev** (0:36)
Always a pleasure to be with you guys. Thank you.

**David** (0:39)
Vlad, we've got you in the ring for 60 minutes. So we've prepped about 60 minutes of lightning round questions for you. You ready?

**Vlad Tenev** (0:44)
Oh gosh, I'm in the ring. Okay, I'm ready.

**David** (0:47)
60 minutes are going to come at you fast. We're going to start with the great wealth transfer. So there's a massive intergenerational shift of assets expected over the coming decades as baby boomers, silent generation, pass on their wealth to Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, roughly 70 to 90 trillion in the US alone, transferring over the next 20-ish years. Largest wealth transfer in history. How much of this guides Robinhood's strategy? How often are you thinking about this 70 to 90 trillion dollar opportunity? Or is there something else that's kind of guiding you at Robinhood?

**Vlad Tenev** (1:17)
We think about it quite a bit. And I think if you look, a lot of companies have started talking about this great wealth transfer. And of course, it was sort of like in niche circles, discussed maybe like by economists and stuff like that. But I think you can trace back the origins of it being a big fintech topic to last year when we launched Robinhood banking at our gold event.
And the way we think about it, Robinhood at the highest possible level is, we want to serve all customers, whether they're business or institutional, whether they're US or international. And Robinhood should be the place where all of your money and assets are served best. And it should be as easy as possible to deposit into Robinhood and as easy as possible to withdraw. But we also treat every withdrawal as an opportunity or a defect with the system that we can fix. And we think that we have a huge opportunity as these older generations are having inheritance events and giving money to younger to not just serve the older generations, but to have all the products and features so that you're at a disadvantage keeping your money and assets elsewhere. That's really been informing our strategy of what types of products and features we wanted to add to the ecosystem. Obviously, credit and banking gives us access to a large chunk of assets out there that are being stored in checking and savings accounts and also the spending flows, which comprise so much of what customers do with their money. And then if you look at this year, their custodial accounts, trust accounts, expanding the assets that we offer on the platform, that helps us go after both the youngest customers at the point of receiving assets, but also wealthier established customers, which is where the assets currently sit. So it's not like we're just sitting there waiting for people to inherit money, or trying to serve the parents and grandparents and make it clear they're at a disadvantage using any other financial platform today. And I think that positions us well when we get to kind of the hump of the wealth transfer, which we anticipate will happen in about eight to ten years.

**Ryan** (3:53)
Let's talk about eight to ten years from now. Finance has changed a lot in the past 15 or so years since you guys have been around. How is finance going to look in 2040? In what ways will it be the same versus different? Because I guess I did just say finance has changed a lot, and it has in many ways. But in other ways, it's like, it's very similar to how it actually was. What does finance 2040 look like? Are we doing 24 by 7, 365 markets? Is like AI involved? I mean, what's the same and what's different then?

**Vlad Tenev** (4:26)
Yeah, I think that we'll definitely have 24, 7, 365 markets. That's something that we started like pushing towards in 2022
On the equity side with 24-hour market. And now you see the industry catching up. A lot of the exchanges are making plans to go 24, 7 and open on weekends. And I think the technology is certainly there and there's some work to be done. But I think it's going to happen much before then. Tokenization, which is another thing that we were pushing ahead with. Last year, we did an event in France where we launched tokenized versions of a large number of US stocks. I think we're at well into the 1000s now. We've been expanding that offering and also the OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways. And so that's still early and we're still in phase one of our journey. But I think by the end of this year, we should be at a point where the stock tokens actually have advantages over buying traditional stocks in a brokerage account. I think that's very exciting. And you can imagine if you can solve 24-7 liquid access with private equity, that to me is the hardest version of the problem. So that allows you to have 24-7, 365 markets for pretty much everything.