Robinhood Markets Inc. will pay as much as $10.2 million in penalties to settle allegations stemming from a multistate probe into outages that left customers unable to trade during market volatility fueled by the pandemic in March 2020.
The investigation, conducted by state securities regulators, found that the Menlo Park, California-based brokerage, which pioneered free stock trades for retail customers, had deficiencies in many parts of its operations. Robinhood failed to exercise due diligence before approving options trading, report complaints to a regulator and supervise technology critical to providing customers with core broker-dealer services, among other issues, regulators said.
“Robinhood repeatedly failed to serve its clients, but this settlement makes clear that Robinhood must take its customer care obligations seriously and correct these deficiencies,” Andrew Hartnett, Iowa’s securities regulator and head of the North American Securities Administrators Association, said in a statement. Robinhood didn’t admit to or deny the regulators’ findings.
In March 2020, as the pandemic fueled a boom in online trading and expanded the firm’s user base, its platform went dark for an entire trading day. Lawsuits followed the outage, which left customers angry about missing a massive rally.
The states party to the settlement were Alabama, Colorado, California, Delaware, New Jersey, South Dakota and Texas.
“We are resolving this matter with the states and are pleased to put it behind us,” Lucas Moskowitz, Robinhood’s deputy general counsel and head of government affairs, said in a statement. “The settlement relates to past issues that Robinhood has since invested heavily in improving, including the launch of 24/7 chat and phone support, expanding our library of educational materials and strengthening the way we supervise our technology.”
Robinhood settled similar allegations by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in 2021. Still, regulatory scrutiny continues. In February, the firm disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission is probing its cryptocurrency business.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.