Webull Financial, the popular online stock brokerage, has concealed the extent of its corporate and financial links to China, according to a new report from the House Select Committee on China. The company stores data on Chinese servers, which are exposed to national security rules requiring local companies to share investor information with the Chinese government.
Webull’s China-based subsidiaries have also received cash rewards from the Chinese government, while maintaining an opaque ownership structure staffed with Chinese nationals, according to the report, which was a bipartisan effort between the House committee’s ranking membership.
“Using technology providers in mainland China and an opaque China-linked ownership structure, Webull exposes its data to our foremost adversary,” said John Moolenaar, the committee’s chair. “Investors should heed this information when choosing who they do business with.”
To American retail investors, who have increasingly embraced mobile trading platforms like Robinhood in recent years, Webull appeared to be an ordinary stock brokerage. But in 2024, a previous investigation led by Moolenaar and his Democratic counterpart revealed that the company had entered into technology-sharing agreements with Chinese companies. The investigation also discovered significant personnel overlap between Chinese companies and Webull subsidiaries.
The House committee’s report comes as Washington struggles to regulate the exploding financial technology sector, which encompasses mobile stock brokerages like Webull and Robinhood, as well as the Wild West of app-based sports gambling and online prediction markets.
Representative Ro Khanna, the House committee’s ranking Democrat, has made reining in the tech industry’s excesses a focus of his political career, an effort which seldom fails to intersect with China’s rise as a technological superpower.
“Whether it’s this trading app or other brokerage apps, custodians of Americans’ financial data and savings should strive for transparency with the customers they serve. Webull should be forthright about its connections to the PRC, rather than seemingly seeking to minimize them,” Khanna said in a statement, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
With Democrats poised to win big in the approaching midterm elections, Khanna may soon assume leadership of the House committee on China, potentially shifting its efforts in a more economically populist direction. For now, shady links between financial technology and the Chinese Communist Party continue to be an area of bipartisan concern.
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