Problem

Robinhood wants to democratize finance by moving investment towards the individual instead of the institution.

Scaling has created obstacles in deepening customer relationships, agility in development and service, and operational efficiency.

Approach

Interviewed 12 stakeholders across the customer experience, advanced services, and cx operations teams.
Conducted a transformation workshop with stakeholders, senior leaders, and their teams.
Use human-centered design to reduce attrition, improve scalability, and consolidate information.

Shifting Robinhood to a Growth Mindset

To truly democratize financial services, Robinhood needs to focus on creating an ecosystem of investments, banking, and payment solutions.

Successful peers include SoFi and Wealthfront, and their products that address different customer needs.

Their corporate culture needs to shift from a platform to service.

What’s Needed Today

To under Robinhood’s business and obstacles, we conducted a blend of discovery activities to uncover systemic challenges, stakeholder dynamics, and unmet opportunities.

Understanding the PRoblem

12 Interviews
Stakeholders, leaders, team members

6 Work sessions
Gap analysis, change readiness assessment, capabilities mapping, competitive analysis, journey mapping

Customer Service

Service disruptions due to spikes in transaction volumes have impacted perceived reliability of the platform.

Limited use of omnichannel strategy to deliver consistent services and manage customer expectations.

User frustration with time to resolve service issues.

Customer Relationships

Transparency, branding, and value proposition have been questioned in light of recent operational glitches.

Customer acquisition is historically driven by intuitive CX and favorable fee model versus an understanding of the customer’s lifetime goals.

Lack of a consolidated customer profile or trading history to be able to provide advice or guidance.

Sense & Response

Gap in business intelligence capabilities to proactively sense issues. It’s reactive instead of proactive or predictive.

Lack of agility to quickly mitigate issues and communicate to users at scale.

Decisions made in moments of crisis, such as limited selling/buying or volume caps, have caused negative customer sentiments. This creates attrition risks as customers look to other platforms.

Operational Efficiency

A lack of business and technological agility led to compliance scrutiny during several recent retail investor events.

Due to disconnected systems, multiple data sources, and technical debt, operational efficiency suffers.

Limited scalability as the resources are consumed in other business areas, directly hindering the achievement of the growth goals.

Our Recommendation

After our interviews and workshop, we helped Robinhood define a new goal: to redefine their relationship with customers and strengthen their pursuit of democratizing finances.

This lofty goal would pivot them from being a trading platform to a full-service financial partner. To achieve this, they would need to redesign their data for the customer and employee experience by creating a single, 360º view.

Solutioning

3 Workshops
Innovation sprint, service blueprinting, vision mapping

40 Concepts Generated

Customer Experience

Create agility to sense user needs and rapidly respond to prioritize new offerings and experiences.

Insights to Predict and Prevent
Gather real-time insights to sense when a problem may be about to occur and create a self-healing service.
Take Action In-context
Collaborate and communicate with colleagues in context of the data and the moment.
Insight-driven experiences
Leverage insights with centrally managed interactions and cases to create positive experiences.

Employee Experience

Re-think operations and the underlying technology to simplify and allocate resources to help achieve the growth goals

Rationalize Application Footprint
Reduce technical debt by rationalizing the applications and effectively deploy resources to achieve growth goals
Single Source of the Truth
Ensure one system of records (SOR) for all internal systems to improve internal operation efficiency
Create best-in-class integration
Create scalable API integrations to Major Oak and other core systems using Mulesoft

Transformation

Develop an Enterprise digital operating model with a focus on user experience and growth goals backed by clean, organized data

Unified Experiences
Deliver a seamless experience for
both customers and employees across all touchpoints
Scaling Growth
Transition to SaaS model to improve organizational efficiency, agility and scalability to meet growth goals
Connecting Data
Create standardized data guidelines. Extend data models to create connected data lakes build a single view of the customer.