A home with Robinhood

When two titans of the investment industry came after Robinhood, they reminded Jacqueline Ortiz Ramsay of middle school bullies.

Ramsay, Robinhood’s director of public policy communications, knew the company needed to respond after Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger blasted it during a May investor meeting.

Robinhood had already spent months trying to quell public and congressional backlash over its connection to the GameStop trading frenzy, and Buffett’s implicit comparison of the company to a casino had sparked more even criticism from Wall Street veterans.

But it was Munger’s denunciation of Robinhood as a “god-awful” and “deeply wrong” operation that upset Ramsay the most — and prompted her to put her name on the line for its defense.

“If the last year has taught us anything, it is that people are tired of the Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers of the world acting like they are the only oracles of investing. And at Robinhood, we’re not going to sit back while they disparage everyday people for taking control of their financial lives,” she wrote.

Ramsey said in a recent interview that the rebuke from Buffett and Munger “hurt” because she saw Robinhood as the next step in a line of innovation they set off long ago.

“I was shocked because it didn’t make sense to me,” Ramsay said.

“We’re literally just trying to learn about investing, and we’re at a point in our lives where now we can apply the learnings from the books like ‘The Snowball,’ ” Ramsay said, referring to the acclaimed 2008 Buffett biography.

In her response to Buffett and Munger, Ramsay recounted how she and her husband, both first-generation Americans, “raced through” the doors to financial markets opened to them by Robinhood and jumped at a chance to build wealth their parents couldn’t.

But Ramsay told The Hill that those comments struck a much deeper chord, evoking the same feeling as when she saw her husband, then just the new kid at her middle school in South Florida, being harassed by bullies.

“What they said was not right. It’s injustice, to me,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay joined Robinhood shortly before the GameStop frenzy as one of several Washington veterans recruited to improve its standing among lawmakers and regulators.

Ramsay got her start in political communications with former President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in Florida. After the election, she held several media relations roles in the Obama administration before eventually landing at the Consumer Bankers Association, a Washington trade group for U.S. banks, in 2016. Ramsay then spent nearly four years as the vice president of media relations at the National Association of Federally Insured Credit Unions before joining Robinhood in January, jumping from one of the least politically contentious industries to a company under incredible pressure.

Ramsay was one of several Washington veterans recruited by Robinhood as it faced mounting problems with regulators. The company exploded in popularity by offering a wide range of investments with no up-front fees or account minimums, catching on quickly amid a surge of younger investors — including Ramsay and her husband.

The youngest of three children of an aerospace engineer and a public school teacher, Ramsay said she was drawn to Robinhood in part after seeing her father struggle to build wealth.

“I give him a lot of credit because I think he knew that it takes a lot to build more for your family. But I think what he didn’t have was a network or the resources to start,” Ramsay said, arguing Robinhood has unlocked new possibilities for generations without access to such things.

“Having the opportunity to choose and decide for ourselves the lives we want to lead, it’s the very definition of what it means to be a democracy, right? Robinhood is taking this fundamental premise and simply applying it to an industry where this break between the haves and have-nots is wider than most.”

But the company has also drawn considerable backlash, both in Washington and on Wall Street, for a series of major regulatory and customer support lapses during its rise to prominence.

Robinhood paid a record-breaking $70 million in fines and restitution to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in June after the market watchdog alleged that it regularly failed to provide customers with adequate and accurate information. The company’s role in and inability to keep up with the GameStop incident also spawned intense criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Ramsay, however, didn’t hesitate to join the fight.

“I had no doubt. I didn’t even need to hear anything else about the job details or anything,” Ramsay said.

“My husband and I were already customers of the platform, and it just makes sense to us. We feel like we have a home,” she continued. “I already had this experience — a positive experience — with them. It was a no-brainer move.”

Ramsay acknowledged Robinhood’s “growing pains” but touted its recruitment of a team of Wall Street and Washington veterans to establish a proper regulatory and legal apparatus for a company of its size. Chief among those additions is Daniel Gallagher, a former Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner who became the company’s chief legal officer.

“People are coming to Robinhood for a reason, because I do believe that people know and see that we stand for something bigger and better,” Ramsay said.

“We stand for doing the right thing, and I’m not sure if everyone is on board with us being the new kid on the block.”