Fintech unicorn Robinhood under regulatory scrutiny over March outage
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(Reuters) — Robinhood Markets Inc., the fintech startup credited with helping popularize trading among millennials, is being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Regulatory Authority over its handling of a system outage in March, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
One area of focus for the investigation is Robinhood’s lack of customer response, the report said, citing people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
Robinhood is one of the hottest fintech startups in Silicon Valley, having been valued at $11.2 billion in its most recent funding round.
The company, however, has been criticized for not doing enough to moderate excesses after one of its customers took his life believing he had lost more than $730,000 using the free trading app.
Robinhood, based in Menlo Park, California, has experienced several outages since early March, particularly on days of high trading volumes.
The SEC and the FINRA did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment.
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