Controversial stock trading app Robinhood has publicly filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its upcoming IPO.
The move comes just days after the firm was was slapped with a $57 million fine by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra). The regulatory body also ordered the trading app to pay approximately $12.6 million in restitution, plus interest, to thousands of "harmed customers".
Finra says that Robinhood hurt customers by giving them misleading information, by suffering systems outages in March 2020, and by approving thousands of customers to trade options even when it was not appropriate.
Robinhood has emerged in recent years as one of fintech's biggest success stories, garnering millions of users and a multi-billion valuation.
However, this has been accompanied by a series of controversies. In December it was hit with a $65 million fine by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading customers about payment for order flow practices that cost traders over £34 million in lost gains.
Then in February, it emerged that US regulators had made inquiries about the trading restrictions the app put on stocks such as GameStop during the Reddit-led rallies earlier this year.
At the time, Robinhood said it was also aware of around 46 putative class actions and three individual actions that have been filed against it.
Robinhood has raised huge sumes of cash this year, accompanied by a surge in trading that is expected to see the firm triple its revenues in 2021 after hitting over $500 million in turnover in the first quarter.
The firm first submitted its draft application for a public float on Nasdaq back in March. In its official filing, Robinhood says the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, although industry insiders indicate that it could go to market with a $40 billion price tag.
Listing under the ticker symbol 'HOOD', the firm has slected Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan as lead book runners. Barclays, Citigroup and Wells Fargo Securities are also acting as active book-running managers for the proposed offering.
In keeping with its vision of making everyone a stock trader, the firm plans to set aside as much as 35% of its IPO shares for its users to buy. Or as The Wall Street Journal put it, "Robinhood wants people to buy Robinhood on Robinhood".