Treasury taps BNY Mellon and Robinhood to power $1,000 savings accounts for millions of US children
Two financial companies have jumped ahead of the competition as the Treasury Department uses Bank of New York Mellon and Robinhood to get a new savings program for American children off the ground.
This week, the Treasury declared that BNY has been officially appointed as a federal financial agent to assist with the new Trump Accounts initiative.
As the brokerage and initial trustee for the accounts under that agreement, Robinhood will be at the center of one of the largest government savings initiatives in the nation’s history. BNY will handle the back-end account infrastructure, while Robinhood has been brought in to design and build a custom app for the Treasury under its own brand.
“Our task is clear: to provide the next generation of Americans with a world-class, intuitive platform to jumpstart their financial future,” Robinhood chief executive Vlad Tenev said in a statement.
The National Design Studio is also involved in building the app’s interface, though the Treasury said it will retain control over the app and the initial accounts.
Eligibility and early sign-ups
The program was created under legislation President Donald Trump signed on July 4, 2025, known as the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”
It provides a $1,000 government-funded account, invested in index funds, to every American child born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028. Last week, the Internal Revenue Service said that 4 million families had already signed up.
Tens of millions of children are expected to be eligible. The accounts grow without being taxed along the way, and the investments are kept conservative at the start, with index funds made up mostly of American stocks and fees of 0.1% or less.
Parents act as custodians, making decisions about how money is managed or moved. Within a year, families will be allowed to transfer their accounts to other financial institutions of their choosing, which could give Robinhood a path to bring those families into its broader set of products, including stocks, options, and cryptocurrency.
For Robinhood, this marks a notable step beyond its roots as a trading platform.
The company has been working to position itself as a broader wealth management business, including through its work on tokenization and its purchases of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp and the trading technology firm Talos.
Getting involved in a long-term government savings program fits that direction, giving the company access to a pool of assets that does not rise and fall with short-term trading activity.
A possible on-ramp for crypto
Cryptocurrency plays no part in the accounts right now.
But Robinhood’s position as the entry point for millions of young Americans into investing puts it in a strong spot as those children grow older, and rules around digital assets may shift.
When a child turns 18, the account begins following the tax rules that apply to individual retirement accounts, which could eventually tie these savings vehicles into broader conversations about digital assets in American financial life.
At that point, families may gain more flexibility to reallocate holdings.
Given Robinhood’s deep integration of crypto trading and tokenization, and its ownership of Bitstamp, the company is well positioned to become a natural on-ramp for digital assets if future regulations loosen or younger generations push for crypto exposure in their savings.
This arrangement may eventually make it more difficult to distinguish between traditional government-backed savings vehicles and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, particularly if Robinhood continues to expand its cryptocurrency products and advocates for more precise regulations for digital assets in Washington.
The Trump Accounts initiative may be a big, government-seeded client-acquisition engine for the next wave of cryptocurrency adoption, for a company that already allows users to trade stocks, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and dozens of other tokens.
For the time being, the program’s success and its ability to reach the families it was intended to assist remain the key priorities.
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