The timing was also terrible, right after their big crash earlier in the week. Every single interview addressed that.
Where trust is involved, bad publicity can be worse than no publicity.
One-off press events with negative sentiment typically only affect brands that are getting to be known for the first time.
While a disastrous launch, most people who heard about this Robinhood checking already knew about the app. I don't think it's going to affect their brand much but will have driven app downloads to check it out, or re-acquisition of churned users. Referral events like this end up driving more core activity, which for Robinhood is making more deposits and trades (not signing up for checking).
Robinhood got a lot of press from this, well beyond their existing target market.
The fact that they announced this before confirming it with regulators smacks of CEO arrogance in the "Funding Secured!" vein.
From my comment:
>One-off press events with negative sentiment typically only affect brands that are getting to be known for the first time.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
Furthermore, this fits into their narrative of disruption. Their target audience will likely see this as, "stupid big banking industry trying to make it hard for them again."
Because not only will I not use them for this, I closed my account entirely 'cause this is the sign of a disreputable company.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that's a lie.
That's a pretty small target audience, and those people are heavy into crypto and gold. Robinhood needs customer growth, and a nice, safe interest-bearing chequing account would have been a good way of doing it.