SoFi’s Membership Jumps to 12.6M, Highlighting Edge Over Trading-First Fintech Peers

What happened

A new Motley Fool comparison of SoFi and Robinhood highlights that SoFi’s membership base has surged to 12.6 million, up from just over 10.1 million at year-end 2024, while its expanding loan business continues to be a key growth driver. This incremental data point dovetails with recent filings showing SoFi’s broader bank-plus-platform strategy gaining scale, including $32.9 billion of deposits and record fee-based revenue through Q3 2025. By contrast, the article frames Robinhood primarily around its role as an easy-to-use trading and crypto platform, implicitly contrasting SoFi’s more diversified lending, deposit, and platform-fee mix. The coverage reinforces the narrative that SoFi is evolving into a full-service digital bank and B2B platform, rather than a narrow trading app, which can support more durable engagement and monetization per member. Overall, the article is sentiment- and perception-positive, but does not introduce new financial risks or regulatory issues beyond those already captured in the master report.

Implication

For investors, the new membership figure of 12.6 million suggests SoFi is converting its product funnel and marketing spend into user growth at a pace slightly ahead of what was implied in prior filings, which supports operating leverage over time. The comparison with Robinhood emphasizes SoFi’s advantage in having multiple monetization levers—lending, deposits, and technology/platform fees—rather than relying heavily on trading volumes and crypto activity. This dynamic can justify some premium to more cyclical or monoline fintechs, but the existing P/E near 49 means much of this growth story is already reflected in the share price. The article does not change core risk factors around funding costs, unsecured credit performance, or capital markets access, so portfolio sizing should still respect SoFi’s sensitivity to credit cycles and capital-market conditions. Net-net, the news supports maintaining positions or adding on volatility rather than chasing strength purely on this sentiment boost, keeping a close eye on credit quality and deposit trends in upcoming quarters.

Thesis delta

Our core BUY thesis remains unchanged, but we modestly increase conviction around the durability of SoFi’s growth engine given that memberships have already reached 12.6 million versus just over 10.1 million at year-end 2024. The peer framing versus Robinhood reinforces SoFi’s positioning as a more diversified, deposit-funded bank-plus-platform rather than a trading-centric app, which supports the idea that its revenue mix should prove more resilient across cycles. This strengthens our qualitative view of the moat but does not, on its own, warrant a change to our rating or a material adjustment to valuation assumptions.