Why Vlad Tenev thinks you’ll want Robinhood’s ‘James Bond’ credit card

“That’s the heaviest card ever made,” says Vlad Tenev as he slides a silvery metallic rectangle weighing 50 grams across a conference-room table.

“You want to be James Bond?” Robinhood Markets’ CEO asks. “This is the card for you. If Sean Connery was still alive, this is the card that Q would give him to put in his wallet.”

The online brokerage debuted its platinum credit card this month, going up against industry stalwarts like American Express and JPMorgan Chase, as part of Tenev’s drive to broaden its reach beyond the meme stock traders and crypto buyers who have driven its growth.

The wallet-straining card is the latest step towards his vision of running a financial “super app” that offers customers anything from banking services to help with estate planning, he explains.

“We should make it so that Robinhood is the best place for all of your financial needs. You should keep all of your money, all of your assets, on Robinhood. Do all of your spending with us. Do all of your banking with us.”

Robinhood Banking just crossed $1 billion in deposits, he tweeted this week — a fraction of the funds his big bank rivals hold, but a start.

That ambition has helped power Robinhood to a $68 billion valuation, and Tenev seems undeterred by the crowded nature of the markets he will have to conquer to fulfil it.

“Nobody’s really built the James Bond card,” he replies when asked about his well-resourced competition. “Do you see him using American Express? Not a chance. What about Chase Sapphire Reserve? It’s not exclusive enough.”

The luxury role physical products play in a digital world

The Robinhood Platinum cards boast 99.9% pure platinum plating, charge a 29.99% annual percentage rate, and are only available to clients willing to pay a $695 annual fee. “This card isn’t really for normal people, it’s very elite,” Tenev says.

At the same time, he believes its “aspirational” nature will expand the premium credit card market beyond the usual ranks of high-earning business travelers.

He’s also betting that a customer base that came to Robinhood for its digital capabilities will want a physical expression of the money they have made trading on its app.

“Physical credit cards are becoming style and fashion symbols, much like the iPhone,” Tenev says, wielding a smartphone clad in a bright copper case. Robinhood’s new cards have no numbers printed on them, making them impossible to use for online purchases without its app — but practicality is not the point.

“When we thought about the physical card, [we asked ourselves,] ‘What role does this play now that everything is Apple Pay or digital payments?’” he recalls. Robinhood decided it should think about the card like a luxury watch, he says, flashing the timepiece on his wrist.

“I don’t have this watch because I care that it tells accurate time. It’s really sh*t at telling time, and it’s annoying, but it’s like a piece of jewelry, and it’s a statement about who you are,” Tenev explains.

Cards have “already lost the practicality battle to digital payments,” he adds, but Robinhood’s new product is something that its customers will want to put down on the table at a restaurant to impress their friends as they offer to pick up the bill. Besides, he adds, it offers 5% cash back on dining purchases, “so they should let you pay.”

Disrupting the bankers, with the help of a bank

Tenev’s ambitions have evolved over time. As far back as 2019, he pursued the idea of obtaining a bank charter, as a way to offer customers higher yields on the cash they held in their Robinhood brokerage accounts. He decided instead to shop around companies that already had a charter.

“The banks that were hungry for deposits would offer [us] the high yield, and we would just send the money there,” he says. Revolut, the UK fintech, last week filed for its own US bank charter, but Tenev is pursuing an alternative path, working with banking industry underdogs. Dozens of banks are competing to be the best banking-as-a-service provider, he says and Robinhood has its pick of them. Its new platinum card is backed by Coastal Community Bank, which is headquartered in Everett, Washington, and has just 14 branches.

Community banks are “in a war to try to keep deposits away from the big [global systemically important banks],” Tenev notes. Bank charters also come with the kind of regulatory strictures that persuaded Robinhood that the costs of obtaining one outweigh the benefits.

Starting with the hardest things first

Tenev’s business has a long way to go before it will start troubling the credit card industry’s leaders, and he acknowledges the power of the cross-selling engine the likes of Chase have, with their extensive networks of bank branches and wealth advisers. But “they have some gaps,” he adds, where Robinhood can make a name for itself.

The banks’ legacy technology systems represent the biggest of these opportunities, he thinks. “They’re still running on mainframes, so it’s hard for them to catch up to the frontier.” If Robinhood can deploy better technology to offer a better customer experience at a lower cost, it can offer incentives for people to move assets over to its services.

The “technology-first” advantage Tenev thinks Robinhood has over the banks stems from the fact that it started in the complex, high-stakes world of trading. The risk of losing customers’ money if its systems failed for even a short period “trained us to be a lot more operationally competent,” he says. “We started with the hardest thing in financial services first, and that’s been a nice wedge to expand from… Now we’re operating a credit card business, we’re like, ‘Nothing to it.’”

A ‘wartime’ CEO’s hands-off battle plan

Robinhood’s latest banking offering is its fourth attempt to crack the market, Tenev says, because “the first three didn’t really work.” But he portrays that as a feature of a business that is constantly improving, and of his own approach to leadership.

Robinhood’s short history has been tumultuous. In early 2021, the National Securities Clearing Corporation demanded a $3 billion collateral deposit. The massive margin call sparked a liquidity crisis that forced it to restrict trading in the middle of volatile trading in GameStop, a favorite of meme stock traders at the time. Online and in congressional hearings, Tenev was accused of aiding hedge funds that had shorted GameStop, at amateur traders’ expense.

Robinhood’s stock fell 90% in 2022 as the meme stock mania subsided and then flatlined. Then its shares rocketed between early 2024 and last October, as it expanded into crypto and prediction markets, only to halve since then, as falling crypto markets weighed on its earnings.

Tenev’s message to his team throughout has been that “it’s always wartime,” he told HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan recently. If things look too calm, he reasons, that probably means they are not executing aggressively enough and it’s time for him to shake things up.

As the company has grown, he says, it has become more important for him to turn his general managers into “mini-CEOs,” trusting that the business will not “go off the rails” if he leaves them unsupervised to work on initiatives like the platinum card for months at a time.

He hopes to get to a point where his involvement would only harm such projects, he says, “and then what I’d do is just spin up more businesses. If my involvement with the existing businesses only hurts them, then I have to be smart enough to realize that I’m not needed here.”

His job as CEO, he says, is to make the right calls on setting ambitious goals, get people around him to agree with and implement them, and then make sure that what they build is good enough to meet customers’ needs. “And if it doesn’t, we don’t give up. We just keep iterating.”

When a battered journal beats an AI agent

Some CEOs now rely on digital conversations with AI agents trained on their past pronouncements as they hone ideas for new product launches. Tenev prefers to write his thoughts down by hand each night. Pulling a battered blue journal with a broken spine from his bag, he explains that he doesn’t want an agent knowing everything he thinks. “I’m a little nervous about that. I want to stay unique.”

Instead, his ideal evening involves putting away his phone half an hour before he goes to sleep, then picking up a pen and the notebook to write out his thoughts by candlelight. He jots down the highlights of that day and his priorities for the following one, to review the next morning. That helps him wake up “ready to go,” he says: “I feel like I’ve done my thinking already.”

Tenev started his current journal in May 2024, and carrying it around with him lets him check his progress against goals he has set for himself, he adds. But his journaling habit is most effective as a wind-down routine, he says. “I tend to run a little hot.”