Robinhood brings commission-free investing to five new markets

Starting today, customers in five additional countries can open a Robinhood account, trade thousands of stocks and ETFs with no commission, and manage their portfolio entirely from the app.

The expansion is the largest single rollout in the company’s history and caps a year of steady international growth. Twelve months ago Robinhood operated in a single market. Today it serves customers across the region, and this launch alone adds several million people to the platform’s addressable market.

“Our goal has never changed,” said a company spokesperson. “We want to make the financial system work for everyone, not just the people who already have access to it. Every market we enter is another few million people who can start investing on their own terms.”

For many of those people, the main barrier to investing has been cost rather than interest. Traditional brokerage accounts in several of the new markets still charge a fixed fee per trade, often high enough that buying a small amount of a single stock makes little financial sense. Minimum deposits, custody fees and paper-based onboarding add further friction. Robinhood’s model removes those costs, and with them the idea that investing is only worth doing once you already have a large sum to put to work.

Bringing more people into the market is the whole point. The fees were never the product. Access is.

What’s available at launch

Customers in the new markets get the same core experience available elsewhere on the platform, localised for their region. At launch that includes:

• Commission-free trading on thousands of stocks and exchange-traded funds
• Fractional shares, so an investment can start from as little as one unit of local currency
• Recurring investments on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule
• Real-time market data and price alerts across every supported instrument
• A cash account with competitive interest paid on uninvested balances
• Customer support in the local language, available in the app seven days a week

Additional products, including retirement accounts and access to private-market offerings, will follow over the coming quarters as local regulatory approvals are completed. The company said it would not launch a product in a market until it could offer it with the same protections customers receive elsewhere on the platform.

How pricing works

Buying and selling stocks and ETFs carries no commission. Where a customer buys a share listed in a different currency from their own, a small currency conversion fee applies, and it is shown in full on the order screen before the trade is placed. There is no account fee, no inactivity fee and no charge for depositing or withdrawing money by bank transfer.

Robinhood earns revenue from currency conversion, from interest on customer cash held with partner banks, and from optional premium features. The company publishes a plain-language breakdown of how it makes money, and the new markets will receive a localised version of that page at launch.

Opening an account

New customers can sign up in the app in a few minutes. Identity checks are handled digitally using a national ID or passport and a short selfie video, and most applications are approved the same day. Once verified, customers can fund their account by bank transfer or, in supported markets, by instant payment, and begin investing straight away.

Every account is held in the customer’s own name with a regulated custodian, separate from Robinhood’s own assets. Eligible holdings are covered by the relevant national investor-protection scheme, and cash balances are protected under local deposit guarantee rules where they apply.

Built for the way people actually invest

The company said the rollout was shaped by more than a year of research into how first-time investors behave in each market. Rather than porting a single template across borders, Robinhood localised everything from the onboarding flow to the way tax documents are generated, working with local partners so the experience felt native rather than translated.

Some of the differences are small. Number formats, date formats and the order in which names are written all vary. Others are more significant. In two of the new markets, investment gains are taxed under schemes that require specific annual statements, and Robinhood will generate those automatically each year so customers do not have to reconstruct their trading history themselves.

That approach extends to education. Every new customer is guided through a short, plain-language walkthrough of the basics before they place their first trade. It covers what a share is, how diversification works and why short-term price movements are normal. In early markets, customers who completed it were more likely to hold their investments for the long term and less likely to sell during periods of volatility.

A focus on long-term investing

While the app supports active trading, the company said the majority of its customers use it to build long-term positions, and that the new markets would be no different. Recurring investments are one of the most used features on the platform, and a growing share of new customers set one up within their first week.

“The people we build for are not trying to beat the market every afternoon,” the spokesperson said. “They want to put a bit aside every month and see it grow. If we do our job well, most of them will open the app less over time, not more.”

What comes next

Robinhood said today’s launch is the first of several planned for the year, and that it expects to be available in a majority of the region’s markets by the end of the following year. Each launch will follow the same approach: local regulatory approval first, then a waitlist, then onboarding in batches so that support and verification teams can keep response times low.

Customers in the new markets can join the waitlist now and will be onboarded over the coming weeks. Those who were already on the waitlist before today will receive an invitation first.