AI Investing and New Banking Trends

Robinhood promises AI exposure for retail investors

Vlad Tenev said Robinhood is looking to give “normal people” exposure to the fastest-growing private AI companies through a new fund, writes the FT today. “AI is going to create ‘widescale disruption, and we want people to have exposure to the drivers of that disruption", he said. Robinhood plans to offer tradeable shares in a new fund managed by its subsidiary Robinhood Ventures, which will invest in a highly concentrated portfolio of five or more ‘best in class’ private companies – and may borrow money to boost its return.” As stocks and crypto surged this year, so did Robinhood, with its shares gaining 225 per cent, the third-best performing stock in the S&P500. It has benefited from new US rules allowing employers to include assets such as private equity in retirement
plans. The trading business, which has become the face of retail investing, recently acquired prediction market Kalshi, with Tenev suggesting it could take a bite out of the insurance market. “A lot of people think that this evolves to become more bespoke and personalised, a direction that’s very exciting,” he said. “If you could price the risk of someone’s house being subjected to a
flood or fire, that could be a much better product potentially than the insurance products that one can currently get.”

Work from home proves hard to reverse

What’s happening with your work-from-home rules? Nubank, a company that literally grew up during the pandemic, wants workers to spend more time in the office. The bank had allowed workers to spend up to 93 per cent of their time working remotely. “Starting in July, employees worldwide must head to the office two days a week, and then three days a week starting in January 2027. Around 70% of Nu’s roughly 9,500 employees will be subject to the new rules, with exceptions for some business areas or in specific cases,” reports Bloomberg. “Nubank’s new policy brings the fintech more in line with Brazilian banks, which are also keeping workers in hybrid setups that allow two or three days from home a week. The number of office days has increased in the sector since 2022, but it’s still a contrast to the push by many US banks to bring staff back to the office five days a week. (Chief executive David) Vélez said Nubank, in determining the new policy, took into account not only work rules in the financial sector but also among other industries.”

Australia’s Westpac said it won’t appeal a ruling that allowed one if its workers to continue working from home. The Fair Work Commission found in favour of Karlene Chandler, who challenged the bank’s assessment that she needed to be in the office twice a week. She said it would require two hours of travel a day, each way, and she was responsible for dropping and collecting her children from school. “Westpac Chief Executive Anthony Miller said at the bank's results briefing this week he believed an in-the-office rule for two to three days a week was best for the bank's workforce,” writes Reuters.

The sports bank?

Andrew Smith, one of the co-founders alongside Nick Ogden at ClearBank and later at RTGS, has another idea in the works, called SPORTA: this time it’s going to be a bank of sorts built for community sporting organisations and their members. The crowdfunding campaign will start this month, but Smith’s own blog about the origin of the idea is worth a read. “That moment came when I had the opportunity to help save a local cricket club,” he writes. “Like so many clubs across the UK, it relied on benefactors to survive.
I’d seen this before, but when I looked at the financials, the reality hit me hard: yes, I could step in and save this club. But in three, maybe four years, someone else would need to do the same. The cycle would repeat. At the same time, I kept coming back to another idea I’d wrestled with since 2018: the need for hyper-personalised banking,” he writes. “Back then, I feared digitalisation
would kill off the bank manager, the person who truly understood the customer. I was right. Banking became efficient, but impersonal. The technology to fix that didn’t exist then. But in 2025, it does. Today, we can build a bank that is both digital and deeply personal. A bank designed around the needs of clubs, athletes, and fans.” You can read the full post here.

How Lloyds uses customer insights for its own staff

Lloyds Bank compared pay of staff with four years plus of employment to pay for the general public to assess their financial resilience ahead of pay negotiations, the FT writes. The analysis found that staff pay had risen by more, and the bank used the insights in its pay negotiations. “The bank’s customer insights team compared the spending habits, saving rates and salary increases of its lowest-paid employees to those of customers and presented them in salary talks with UK trade unions, two people familiar with the matter said. Lloyds, which employs about 65,000 people, had been locked in salary negotiations with staff. Its
customer insights team found that employees had fared better than the general public during the cost of living crisis.” The bank said it had used anonymised data. It offered a raise of £1,200 for both 2026 and 2027, which was accepted by the two unions but rejected by a third union. Lloyds Bank encourages its employees to become customers, and employees sign up for an account as a condition of employment. One union said the use of data was intrusive but another said it was helpful. “The information that was presented to us was helpful in the context of how employees are managing through the cost-of-living crisis,” said Ged Nichols, general secretary of Accord Union. “These are interesting insights into how Lloyd’s staff have fared through the cost of living crisis
and show that on average their salaries have gone up by more than the general population.”

The UK seems to be a top location for closing branches, but Santander came up with another option: rather than closing a branch which would turn into a coffee shop, it’s kept the branch and added a café and co-working space. “Around half of those who use the cafés are non-Santander customers — from students using the co-working spaces, to small businesses using the event spaces — as part of the lender’s push to rethink the role of physical branches,” The Banker reports. The bank said its account openings per employee, a result of both face-to-face and digital sales, had doubled after the bank relaunched branches as work cafés. ‘The cafés have been a huge success with customers across the world, and they continue to prove popular across our five sites in
the UK, with a sixth on the way, and plans to expand to further locations nationwide as part of our future growth plan,’ said Andrew Booth, head of digital and assisted channels at Santander UK. ‘Our work cafés offer a new and distinctive experience for both individuals and SMEs, whether that’s through being able to use co-working spaces, superfast WiFi or hosting an event in the dedicated event space — all can be enjoyed for free, by all,’ Booth said.” The bank now has 200 work cafes worldwide.

The forever mortgages of the future

Dealing with a serious cost-of-living issue, U.S. President Donald Trump has floated the idea of a 50-year mortgage. News outlets compared a $400,000 loan at 6 per cent interest rate over a 30- and 50-year period, with a 30-year monthly payment of $2400 against $2100 for 50 years. (The median house price in the US is $415,000 and current interest rates are around 6 per cent.) Interest over 30 years would amount to $463,000 while interest over 50 years would cost $860,000. In Japan, some people take 100-year mortgages, which ends up spreading the principal over four generations. As you might image, principal reduction is glacial, but these mortgages are taken up by a small number of people. Switzerland has come up with another way to fund its tremendously expensive houses, where banks offer near-perpetual mortgages, which often pass down through families. With a
perpetual mortgage the loan amount remains constant and “buyers” pay only the interest. However, Swiss banks typically limit perpetual mortgages to a maximum of 65-67% of the property's value (loan-to-value ratio). This conservative approach protects both lender and borrower from market fluctuations. Many Swiss homeowners use a hybrid approach: they take out a mortgage with two tranches. The first tranche (usually up to 65% LTV) operates as a perpetual mortgage, while a second tranche (the remaining 15-20%) must be amortized over 15-20 years. This allows wealthy individuals and families to maintain liquidity and invest their capital elsewhere while still owning property, rather than tying up funds in real estate equity. The system works partly because of
Switzerland's historically low interest rates and stable property market, making the ongoing interest payments relatively manageable and predictable.

Eyeballs: the final frontier for fraud

Someone hasn’t been keeping up with the Mission Impossible franchise. China’s Ant International is proposing smart glasses with iris authentication as a new form of payment authentication, and says it will work with Xiaomi and Meizu to create the devices. “Iris authentication is viewed as being more resistant to the spoofing attacks that can plague other biometric methods, such as voice, face or fingerprint recognition, thanks to a larger number of distinguishing feature points,” reports Finextra. “Alipay+ GlassPay's
iris authentication feature compares over 260 biometric feature points to verify and protect the identity of the user. It uses AI and advanced liveness detection technology to counter fraud attempts using photos, videos, or 3D masks.” While AI-enabled criminals are now able to create authentical copies of your voice and even moving image, eyeballs still seem safe. It’s not as wild as you might think. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is still convinced of the potential for smart glasses, and Sam Altman has created a side business for eyeball authentication connected to his World (formerly WorldCoin) cryptocurrency. Ant Financial suggests the new glasses could be used for hailing taxis. We wonder if the smart glasses fire laser beams to attract the driver’s attention?