Robinhood Retirement Accounts Are Getting Closer

But he said: "Robinhood's problem is that their marketing and brand has been targeting young, inexperienced investors and pushing them into taking outsized risks through day trading.  It will take an expensive marketing and rebranding effort, which is not guaranteed to succeed, to change this in order to attract consumers who are looking for the safety and stability of long-term investing."

Iskowitz expressed doubt about how successful Robinhood will be, telling ThinkAdvisor: "The odds are that this pivot will fall flat on its face, at least relative to their expectations. Robinhood's brand is too tightly linked to risky trading of meme stocks for them to convince people that they can be trusted with retirement savings."

Robinhood declined to comment on the Bloomberg report or provide additional details, including a specific launch date.

In the company's last earnings call, on Jan. 27, Vladimir Tenev, Robinhood Markets CEO, president, chairman and co-founder, told analysts: "As we mentioned last quarter, tax-advantaged retirement accounts are on the roadmap and the teams are already hard at work to develop this functionality. And we'll begin rolling it out to customers midyear."

During the call's Q&A, he went on to call it a "key area of focus for 2022," adding that "taking our first-time investors and helping them become long-term investors is a big thread that we've been pulling on."

Retirement and long-term automated investing was an area it had been "very closely looking at" after hearing "lots of customer demand" for it, he told analysts.

Robinhood clients "want multiple account types, including IRAs and Roths," he said, "and I think that coupled with … the work that we've done in recurring [investments], this creates a meaningful opportunity to increase account balances."

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