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The Menlo Park, Calif.-based financial technology and trading platform, which offers traditional asset and cryptocurrency trading, announced the retirement of CFO Jason Warnick in November. He will assume an advisory role in the first quarter of 2026 and will remain with the company until September 1, 2026, as Shiv Verma, senior vice president of finance and strategy and treasurer, moves to the top position in finance.​ Fortune recently spoke with the duo at Robinhood’s Washington, D.C., office to explain how they orchestrated the move and what they learned along the way.

Today, Robinhood has a fully built financial organization and a place in the S&P 500. In 2024, the company achieved total net revenue of $2.95 billion and annual net profit of $1.41 billion. This was Robinhood’s first year of GAAP profitability since its IPO in 2021. Robinhood is growing rapidly: its revenues are already approaching half the size of mid-sized financial companies like Price T. Rowe and Broadridge.

But when Warnick joined the company in late 2018 after two decades at Amazonthe finance function had barely ten people. Verma had been hired as treasurer a few weeks earlier, and there were also a handful of accountants and a financial entrepreneur.

In speaking with Warnick and Verma, both based on the West Coast, they conveyed a startup vibe within the company: informal, not at all stuffy, and open to ideas and debate, and sometimes laughter. “I actually told him it wasn’t too late if he wanted to change his mind,” Verma joked about Warnick’s impending retirement. “I will miss him as a friend.”

Verma considers himself super analytical. “I’m a mathematician, a former bond trader,” he said. But what he learned from Warnick was the ability to delegate. Otherwise, you can “start at six in the morning and continue until midnight,” he said. “And I have a three-month-old at home.”

“His wife is certainly angry with me, isn’t she?” » Warnick joked. “She loves Jason; she’s not so keen on timing,” Verma replied. “Even though she’s really happy for both of us,” he added.

The camaraderie between Warnick and Verma began as members of a team run by Robinhood. CEO Vladimir Tenevwhich allowed the company to weather rough waters. In March 2020, Robinhood suffered a major outage of its app during one of the most bullish days in market history, preventing users from placing trades. Dow jumped up, Warnick recalled.

“We weren’t engineers and you can feel a little helpless,” he said. But he and Verma quickly concluded that their role was not to fix the code but to sort out the stakeholders. That meant calling bankers, investors and board members in real time and being as transparent as possible, Warnick said. That groundwork, he believes, helped Robinhood raise billions of dollars in early 2021, when meme stock volatility and surging volumes once again strained the platform. The capital raise was intended to strengthen the company’s financial position and support its rapid growth at the time, Warnick said.

Building a successor from the design stage

This transition took years, which is to be expected in a century-old Fortune 500 company, but not necessarily as an agile disruptor. “We have been united for seven years,” jokes Verma. But over those seven years, Warnick gradually expanded Verma’s remit: from treasury to finance, then to investor relations, corporate development, benchmarking and customer strategy, and partnerships. Along the way, Verma hired a dedicated treasurer and vice president of finance, often at Warnick’s request, to allow him to step back and focus on higher-leverage decisions.​

This deliberate expansion of scope reflected Warnick’s own progression to Amazonwhere his responsibilities expanded, ultimately leading to oversight of a 500-person financial organization and the role of chief of staff to the CFO. At Robinhood, the same model meant that by the time the transition was announced, Verma was already managing more than half of the financial organization and acting as the central node of the company. He has attended every board meeting since Robinhood went public, co-presented results, and regularly participated in audit and risk committee sessions.

Verma describes the last seven years as a compressed Silicon Valley life cycle: early development, pandemic-era hypergrowth, Stoppage of play frenzy and IPO, followed by heavy selling. In 2022, Robinhood cut about 30% of its workforce and moved to a chief executive model. “We have come a long way,” Verma said, “to become a very capable public company.”

The most important skill of a CFO

Today, CFOs are expected to own the numbers, but also act as the primary strategist, digital leader and change agent in the business. Earlier in his career, Warnick said a mentor once asked him: What do you think is the most important aspect of a CFO’s job? He answered, capital allocation.

“It’s important, it’s what determines the future returns of the company,” he remembers his mentor telling him. “But you can’t allocate the capital yourself.” According to Warnick, the most important skill of a CFO is influencing the ultimate decision maker: the CEO. “So our job is to bring data and finance into the discussion and influence the outcome,” he said. “And I think that’s an area where Shiv shines.”

Verma spends a lot of time with Tenev, the board and cross-functional leaders from engineering, legal, compliance and risk, focusing on the decisions that matter most to Robinhood’s long-term trajectory, he said.

For financial leaders, what looks like estate planning was arguably the foundation of strong mentorship. “He’s always my first call when I’m struggling with something,” Verma said of Warnick.

As for Warnick’s retirement plans, they are still being worked out, but they will include traveling with his wife, since they are now empty nesters. One thing is certain: if Verma wants advice, it’s just a phone call away.