US based trading service provider Robinhood made an announcement earlier this week announcing appointment of new Chief Operating Officer. As per the statement released by the firm, it had promoted Gretchen Howard, a member of its executive management team to role of Chief Operating Officer. Gretchen Howard joined Robinhood back in November 2018 as Vice President of Operations. Robinhood is known in the industry for its commission free trading app service. As VP of Operations, the scope of Howard’s job was initially to support Robinhood’s customer support function and help in scaling related operations but it was later expanded to include some of key roles such as brokerage operations, product operations, communication, HR & recruitment process.
Prior to joining Robinhood, Gretchen served as one of partners at Alphabet Inc’s CapitalG for nearly five years. Prior to CapitalG, she was a part of Google’s family a period of 8 years during which she served as a managing director at California based the internet and tech giant. Gretchen joined Google in 2006 as the co-site lead in their San-Francisco office and went on to become one it’s managing directors during her tenure with the firm. And before Google, Howard served as a Vice President at Fidelity Investment for four years. Robinhood is one the fastest growing companies in FinTech segment today. As the company is getting closer to its aim of going public, it has started attracting many high profile Wall Street experts including Jason Warnick who spent nearly 20 years serving tech giant Amazon.
Despite, its decision to not charge commission and keep its trading platform a free offering, the start-up has managed to remain successful over the course of last seven years as it has refrained from investing huge sum in huge advertisement and promotional campaigns and avoiding setting up multiple offices in various physical locations. In May 2018, the firm raised nearly $363 Million in its last round of funding bringing its valuation to a whooping US$5.6 Billion in today’s market. Commented on Howard’s promotion to COO, Vlad Tenev one of the co-founders of Robinhood said, “In addition to driving improvements to our operations, Gretchen’s impact can be seen across the organization. At Robinhood, we have an insane customer focus. Gretchen embodies that value and inspires us to build scalable, quality products that expand participation in our financial system. Her leadership as COO will be instrumental as we grow our business, and I’m excited to continue working together to democratize finance for all”.
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