News emerging confirming that the popular U.S. based trading app Robinhood will abandon their UK launch indefinitely. According to CNBC, the U.K clients who enlisted to join the platform were informed of the plans by the company earlier on Tuesday.

A spokesperson of the company cites tough times in the past few months, as the cause of them shelving their expansion plans. Instead, Robinhood will focus on consolidating on their position in its home markets. They are, however, confident that they would eventually venture into the UK markets.

The California based startup had set up a waitlist for potential clients in the jurisdiction late last year as soon as they were greenlighted to commence operations by the Financial Conduct Authority. The commencement of their UK operations would have pitted them against rival fintech firms such as Revolut and Freetrade.

Robinhood further indicated that they would take down their UK website and delete clients emails from their systems to ensure their privacy. Most of their UK staff will integrate into the US teams, with others being cut loose.

Launched in 2016, their user accounts have swelled from 1 Million on launch to more than 13 Million user accounts currently. Their exponential increase in user accounts was recorded in the first quarter of 2020 by more than 3 Million users bringing attributing to multiple outages.

Notably, the firm received a $320 Million cash injection in a recent funding round that was led by TSG Consumer Partners and IVP. The Series F funding round that was launched on May having raised north of $280 Million by then with participation from Sequoia Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Ribbit Capital. This brings their overall valuation to a whopping $8.6Billion.

They were recently found themselves in the middle of a tragedy that caused a backlash from social media. This was after a 20-year-old purportedly committed suicide after hemorrhaging close to $730,000 while trading put options on their trading app.

The firm has since come out to announce measures that would make it harder for their mostly young clientele to access options trading while committing up to $250,000 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention as a donation.

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