This put up is cowritten with Renyu Chen and Dev Tagare from Robinhood.
Robinhood has been a pioneer and disruptor within the as soon as staid world of on-line brokerages. Based in 2013, the corporate reworked an business higher identified for gatekeeping into an open platform accessible to all. Robinhood pioneered commission-free buying and selling, and harnessed the ability of know-how and intuitive design to create a seamless and fascinating expertise for contemporary traders. To at the present time, the corporate continues to disrupt the monetary companies business by launching groundbreaking product improvements on AWS.
Such improvements have made Robinhood one of many quickest rising brokerages in historical past, with greater than 25 million prospects worldwide and a world fame as an innovator and know-how chief. Fueled by its mission of “democratizing finance for all,” the corporate’s give attention to accessibility, notably for first-time traders, has stored Robinhood as one of many prime finance apps on the Apple App Retailer for greater than a decade and earned Robinhood accolades reminiscent of an award from Quick Firm journal as one among World’s 50 Most Revolutionary Corporations. This annual rating highlights corporations which might be reshaping industries and tradition by way of innovation.
Robinhood’s Chief Government Officer, Vlad Tenev, explains why this focus is essential to Robinhood:
“Our perception is, the extra we decrease the limitations to entry, the extra we stage the taking part in discipline and permit individuals to speculate their cash at a youthful age, the higher off our financial system might be and the higher off society might be.”
Constructed to function within the cloud, Robinhood makes use of AWS to energy its on-line enterprise, ship and replace its cellular buying and selling app, securely retailer data and knowledge, and carry out enterprise analytics. Robinhood lately used AI to enhance buyer expertise and broaden accessibility. For instance, in 2025, the corporate will launch Robinhood Cortex, an AI funding instrument that’s designed to offer real-time insights to assist customers higher navigate markets, determine potential alternatives, and keep updated on the newest market transferring information. Cortex is an thrilling step ahead, offering a stage premium funding and market digests which have traditionally been reserved for institutional traders and rich people.
As Robinhood prospects are capable of do extra on the platform, the corporate is working with AWS to discover new generative AI options reminiscent of Amazon Nova, a household of basis fashions (FMs) that make generative AI growth sooner and extra environment friendly, with distinctive worth efficiency. These new options will assist the corporate accommodate speedy enlargement of buyer necessities.
On this put up, we share how Robinhood delivers democratized finance and real-time market insights utilizing generative AI and Amazon Nova.
An AI/ML journey constructed on buyer obsession
Robinhood, like all monetary companies companies, operates in a extremely regulated surroundings. Traditionally, the business was seen as slow-moving and cautious of latest applied sciences. Robinhood’s founders put know-how on the forefront by initially constructing a no-frills, no-fee app that, by design, would make investing accessible to everybody, not simply the very rich. As Robinhood grew, it attracted a greater variety of consumers who want the pace, reliability, safety, and low value the platform affords, however who additionally desire a richer set of companies for various and novel use circumstances.
Robinhood listens intently to those energetic merchants. As Renyu Chen, employees machine studying (ML) engineer at Robinhood, explains,
“We needed to create a seamless journey for AI/ML purposes to go from experimentation to Robinhood scale. We seemed to the AWS group to assist meet the AI/ML wants of our builders whereas offering superior ML tooling to serve our most subtle ‘energetic dealer’ prospects. This could additionally require a plug-and-play method that would undertake the newest generative AI applied sciences from open supply, mannequin suppliers, and home-grown platform tooling.”
Robinhood explored varied generative AI options throughout 2023, concluding that one of the best ways to get to Robinhood scale was with Amazon Bedrock, a completely managed service that helps customers construct generative AI fashions. Amazon Bedrock affords an intensive number of FMs from varied suppliers, and permits a excessive stage of customization and safety by way of a single API.
In accordance with Robinhood’s Renyu Chen,
“For us, the safety of our prospects’ knowledge comes first. Nothing is extra essential. With Amazon Bedrock, knowledge stays beneath our management. After we question a mannequin, the enter and output by no means go away our digital personal cloud. After we fine-tune a basis mannequin, it’s based mostly on a personal copy of that mannequin. This implies our prospects’ knowledge is just not shared with mannequin suppliers, and isn’t used to enhance the bottom fashions.”
To satisfy the wants of Robinhood’s ever-growing base of energy customers, Robinhood is exploring Amazon Nova, estimating that the worth per token utilizing Amazon Nova will be as much as 80% decrease than different fashions they’ve examined, which might make it cost-effective to energy new high-demand use circumstances reminiscent of a fraud investigation assistant, enhanced doc processing, and AI-created content material era.
As well as, AWS generative AI options working by way of Amazon Nova can energy new agentic workflows for Robinhood, during which autonomous AI brokers can independently make selections, adapt to altering conditions, and execute actions.
“Robinhood affords its prospects simplicity, pace, safety, and value financial savings. Working developer-to-developer with the Robinhood group and constructing collectively, we are able to design generative AI options that meet Robinhood’s priorities and customer-focused objectives. For instance, Amazon Nova fashions will be simply custom-made with Amazon Bedrock Mannequin Distillation, which ‘distills’ information from a bigger, extra succesful ‘instructor’ mannequin to a smaller, sooner, and cost-efficient ‘scholar’ mannequin. This answer will help Robinhood use fashions reminiscent of DeepSeek to discover thrilling new use circumstances rapidly, securely, and at a 75% decrease value than equal choices from opponents.”
– Dushan Tharmal, Principal Product Supervisor, Amazon Synthetic Common Intelligence (AGI).
Amazon Nova: Extra companies, larger worth for Robinhood and its prospects
Working with AWS on its bold AI journey, Robinhood is ready to quickly scale new companies for purchasers with no need the expensive buildings, employees, and infrastructure discovered at conventional brokerages. With assist from AWS, Robinhood is ready to supply a richer buyer expertise whereas remaining true to its mission of simplicity, readability, low value, pace, safety, and reliability.
“We see that Amazon Nova is usually a nice match for our mission. Amazon Nova affords the bottom latency responses at very low value, and is correct and lightning-fast throughout a variety of interactive and high-volume Robinhood purposes. And, per Robinhood’s dedication to simplicity and low value for its prospects, utilizing Amazon Nova fashions by way of Amazon Bedrock makes these large-scale duties considerably simpler, cheaper, and more cost effective.”
– Dev Tagare, Robinhood’s head of AI.
Study extra about Amazon Nova and the way it can ship frontier intelligence and business main price-performance to your group.
In regards to the authors
Renyu Chen is a Workers AI Engineer at Robinhood Markets
Dev Tagare is the Head of AI at Robinhood Markets
Uchenna Egbe is a GenAI Options Architect at AWS FSI,
Trevor Spires is a GenAI Options Architect at AWS FinTech.
