US House committee says China may have accessed Webull client data — CNBC

In the United States, the House Select Committee on China published internal correspondence between employees of the investment platform Webull. According to the committee, messages from 2021 indicate that a company employee who was likely in China had access to information about an American client's account.

As CNBC reports, the correspondence in Microsoft Teams was between Brendan Fuller, a manager at Webull's US brokerage unit, and employee Zhenghan Wang, who was called Rock. The discussion concerned problems with a specific trading account and the Customer Identification Program, or CIP.

Committee findings

According to the committee's assessment, Wang was in China during this discussion. It cited message timestamps that corresponded to daytime working hours in Beijing, as well as his use of Simplified Chinese translation. The committee said that all indications available in the correspondence point to the employee being in China and having access to data on an American client.

In the correspondence, Fuller said that the account had been approved by a member of the Chinese team and an employee of the US team. Wang asked under what conditions the opening of an account could be approved under the CIP. He then used a Chinese expression translated as “existing only in name” or “useless.”

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Webull's position

A Webull representative did not directly answer questions about whether Wang had access to US client data in 2021 and whether this contradicted the company's previous statements. At the same time, the company said that US customer data are stored only on AWS servers in Virginia and Oregon, while access to sensitive information is limited to employees based in the United States.

Webull also said that the operations of its US brokerage unit are directed exclusively by employees in the United States and that people outside the country have never had operational authority or decision-making rights regarding this business. The company called the correspondence part of a routine FINRA matter from 2021 that has already been closed, and criticized the timing of the messages' release.

Previously, the committee said that Webull's corporate structure makes its software development, data-processing channels, and key engineering operations dependent on infrastructure subject to Chinese law. Webull has 28 million users; after the committee's report was published on October 7, its shares fell by more than 19%.