The anticipated Robinhood to TradePMR 'bridge' is being erected that makes RIAs -- and their faces -- part of the mobile app
The vision out of Menlo Park is to have its 25 million investors shop RIAs if they need to go beyond self service trading -- making RIAs the only real 'wealth' option.
4 min readTradePMR's 350 RIA custody clients will get first crack at Robinhood's 25 million investors when they become shopkeepers on the mobile app, where trading is the anchor tenant.
At its annual confab, the Gainesville, Fla., RIA custodian laid out the contours of a system that will match wealth managers with clients – and their assets.
It calls the look a “storefront;” the format is more akin to a dating site than a traditional RIA referral network. There is a hint of a yenta role for behind-the-scenes matchmaking.
TradePMR is the RIA custodian Robinhood bought last November for around $300 million.
The two firms ‘officially’ began building the bones of the service when the deal closed, Feb. 26. See: TradePMR sale to Robinhood sends ripples through the RIA industry.
It will trial run the new matching service in late 2025 with a "small" number of its RIA custody clients, according to the firm.
They also expect to spend the first half of 2026 ‘refining’ both the software and the workflows prior to a full launch in mid-2026. See: Robinhood closes TradePMR deal and calls it ‘accretive’
“Robinhood has the next generation of investors … [TradePMR RIAs] have the next generation of advice, and now, there will be a bridge between them,” TradePMR founder and CEO, Robb Baldwin said at its June SYNERGY25 conference, as reported by Tim Welsh, president of Nexus Strategy, for ThinkAdvisor.
TradePMR sale to Robinhood sends ripples through the RIA industry both for its potential to rival big custodians and for the discount broker's potential clash with fiduciary culture
Default option
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said at the event that Robinhood’s objective is to convey its strengths – mobile-first infrastructure, zero-commission trading and efficient onboarding – on RIAs.
For instance, RIA clients will be able to see their RIA assets and trading assets in one neat mobile portfolio accounting display.
For Robinhood, it sees RIAs much the way TD Ameritrade did pre-Schwab acquisition – namely the default wealth management option.
It's a potential winner for RIAs. They get assets on a silver platter, and Robinhood, as TradePMR's owner, retains assets otherwise destined for Merrill Lynch or an RIA with custody at Schwab or Fidelity.
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Robinhood can also use referrals as catnip for drawing RIA prospects to its platform.
“It’s not a terrible idea at all,” says Andrew Besheer, principal of Albany, N.Y. consultancy, Besheer & Associates, in an email exchange.
“It feels a lot like the advisor match solutions that the wirehouses and some of the other large broker-dealers have built over the past few years, allowing you to match on demographic, [or] psychographic criteria ... [making] for a much better filter,” he explains.
Robinhood closes TradePMR deal and calls it 'accretive' and cites cash allocation to build RIA referral network
Match game
The Robinhood investor can electronically browse a slick “storefront” app for wealth managers, featuring photos, credentials, videos, testimonials and locations, the Menlo Park, Calif., company explained.
Still, it will not be a free-for-all where mass-market investors drown high-net-worth advisors in inquiries.
Robinhood will employ matching software to financially qualify investors. It will gauge their planning goals, investing preferences, and their existing account holdings and held-away assets, according to Robinhood Vice President of project management Abhishek Fatehpuria.
It will then match Robinhood retail investors to a curated series of RIA storefronts, Fatehpuria explained, in Welsh's report.
RIAs will also benefit from the ability to rapidly onboard ‘matched’ clients with pre-filled data and digitally signed documents, the trade paper reports.
Increasing competition
It's unknown, at the moment, whether the service will vary from existing match models – not least whether it will take fees or demand to share revenues like Schwab Advisor Services.
It will also face rapidly increasing competition from other referral specialists like SmartAsset, Zoe and FINNY. See: Ten-month-old New York City startup [FINNY] uses artificial intelligence to gin up RIA leads
Since its deal, Robinhood, with $40 billion in custody, has seen its shares explode to $93 from about $25, adding about $50 billion in market cap.
The figure is ostensibly based more on growth prospects in other initiatives related to cryptocurrency, tokenization and betting.
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