This post comes with Dev Tagare from Rinyu Chen and Robinhood.
Robinhood was once a pioneer and destroyer of stable online brokerages. Founded in 2013, the company has transformed the industry well known for gatekeeping into an open platform accessible to everyone. Robinhood has pioneered fee-free transactions and leveraged the power of technology and intuitive design to create a seamless and engaging experience for modern investors. To this day, the company continues to disrupt the financial services industry by launching groundbreaking product innovations on AWS.
These innovations make Robinhood one of the fastest growing brokerages in history, with over 25 million customers worldwide with a global reputation as an innovator and technology leader. Backed by its mission of “democratic finance for everyone,” it focuses on the company's accessibility, particularly for first-time investors, and has maintained Robinhood as one of the Apple App Store's top finance apps for over a decade, winning the award from Fast Commagage as one of World's 50 most innovative companies. This annual ranking highlights companies that are restructuring their industry and culture through innovation.
Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, explains why this focus is important to Robinhood.
“Our belief is that the lower the barriers we enter, the higher the playing field, the better the economy and the better society by leveling the playing field and allowing people to invest money at younger ages.”
Built to work in the cloud, Robinhood uses AWS to drive online business, deliver and update mobile trading apps, securely store information and data, and perform business analytics. Robinhood recently used AI to improve customer experience and expand accessibility. For example, in 2025, the company will launch Robinhood Cortex. It is an AI investment tool designed to provide real-time insights to help users better navigate the market, identify potential opportunities, and provide the latest updates on the latest market movement news. The cortex is an exciting step, offering a level of premium investment and market digestion that has historically been reserved for institutional investors and wealthy individuals.
As Robinhood customers can do more with the platform, the company is working with AWS to explore new generation AI solutions such as Amazon Nova (FMS), which makes generation AI development faster and more efficient and offers exceptional price performance. These new solutions will help the company respond to the rapid expansion of customer requirements.
In this post, we share how Robinhood uses Generative AI and Amazon Nova to provide democratized financial and real-time market insights.
AI/ML journey built on customer obsessions
Robinhood, like all financial services companies, operates in a highly regulated environment. Historically, the industry has been seen as slow and vigilance for new technology. The founders of Robinhood put technology at the forefront by building a no-frills app first that will allow everyone to access their investment, not just the very wealthy. As Robinhood grew, it attracted a wide range of customers who needed the speed, reliability, security and low cost that the platform offers, but who needed a rich set of services for a variety of new use cases.
Robin Hood listens closely to these active traders. As Renyu Chen, Robinhood's Staff Machine Learning (ML) Engineer explains.
“We wanted to create a seamless journey for AI/ML applications to move from experiments to Robinhood scale. We provided the AWS team with advanced ML tools that meet the AI/ML needs of developers and serve the most sophisticated 'active traders' customers.
Robinhood investigated various generation AI solutions in 2023 and concluded that the best way to reach the Robinhood scale is in Amazon Bedrock, a complete management service that helps users build generated AI models. Amazon Bedrock offers a wide range of FMS from a variety of providers, allowing for a high level of customization and security through one API.
According to Robin Hood's Regne Chen,
“For us, security of your data will be the first. There's nothing more important. On Amazon bedrock, data is under control. When you query a model, your inputs and outputs will not leave the virtual private cloud. This is based on a private copy of that model.
To meet the base needs of Robinhood's growing power users, Robinhood is researching Amazon Nova and estimates that the price per token using Amazon Nova can be up to 80% lower than the other models we tested.
Additionally, AWS-generated AI solutions working through Amazon Nova can enhance Robinhood's new agent workflow, allowing autonomous AI agents to make independent decisions, adapt to changing circumstances, and take actions.
“Providing simplicity, speed, security and cost savings for customers to save on developers. You can build developers-to-developers and buildings together. For example, Amazon Nova models can be easily customized with Amazon Bedrock Model Distilation. “Student” models. This solution helps you explore exciting new use cases quickly and safely, and at a cost of 75% less than comparable offerings from competitors using models such as deepseek. ”
– Dushan Tharmal, Principal Product Manager for Amazon Artificial General Information (AGI).
Amazon Nova: More Services, Greater Value for Robinhood and its Customers
Working with AWS on an ambitious AI journey, Robinhood can quickly expand its new services for its customers without the need for the costly structure, staff and infrastructure found in traditional brokerage companies. With support from AWS, Robinhood can remain true to its mission of simplicity, clarity, low cost, speed, security and reliability, while providing a richer customer experience.
“We know that Amazon Nova can be the perfect match for our mission. Amazon Nova offers extremely low cost and lowest latency response, accurate and lightning across a wide range of interactive, large volumes of Robinhood applications. Cost-effective.”
– Dev Tagare, head of AI at Robinhood.
Learn more about Amazon Nova and how to provide frontier intelligence and industry-leading pricing performance for your organization.
About the author
Renyu Chen is a staff AI engineer at Robinhood Markets
Dev Tagare is the head of AI at Robinhood Markets
Uchenna Egbe is a Genai Solutions Architect from AWS FSI.
Trevor Spiers is a Genai Solutions Architect from AWS Fintech.
