Ritchie Torres, a Democrat, represents New York’s 15th Congressional District in the House of Representatives and serves on the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Don Graves served as deputy secretary of commerce from 2021 to 2025.
Tens of millions of Americans trust U.S. financial institutions with their life savings. People give these platforms their most sensitive data and rely on them to save for a home, build a college fund or prepare for retirement. But these institutions are being exploited by the People’s Republic of China.
The PRC wields U.S. market access as a weapon: a tool for capital theft, intelligence collection and economic espionage operating at scale. Beijing seeks to embed itself in the digital underpinnings of American life, like connected hardware in homes and fintech platforms carrying sensitive financial data.
Trust in U.S. public markets, developed over two centuries, depends on transparency and the rule of law. Technology has democratized investing, but a critical gap has emerged. Chinese-born fintech platforms have been licensed to operate as broker-dealers — the gatekeepers of U.S. capital markets — without the necessary level of scrutiny. These platforms collect Social Security numbers, track transaction patterns, monitor money movements and build detailed profiles of investors’ financial behavior. Under PRC law, Beijing can compel any company subject to its jurisdiction to hand over data to the regime’s security officials. Do Americans really want Chinese Communist Party-connected firms holding the keys to their savings?
At the core of several of these platforms lies a deeper layer of technological infrastructure — algorithms and data architecture shaped within China’s regulatory system. Entering U.S. markets through acquisitions, shell-company transactions, direct licensing and public listings, they carry embedded assumptions about control, compliance and state access that regulators are only now beginning to confront.
Consider the teamster in the Bronx or the defense engineer outside Cleveland. If they go home and trade on one of these platforms, they could be flying blind. Neither of them may know that their chosen app’s investors have backed Chinese competitors in the industries they work in or that their financial data may flow to servers beyond the reach of American regulators. It is a structural problem hiding in plain sight.
TikTok gave us a preview of exactly this dynamic: a consumer-facing platform with deep ties to Beijing and no data firewall American regulators could independently verify. Congress and multiple administrations acted on that threat with bipartisan divestiture legislation. Policymakers must act similarly now before they are forced to have that debate at far greater cost.
There is a paradox at the heart of the U.S. competition with China. America’s greatest advantage is the rule of law — the predictable, transparent system of standards that has made U.S. financial markets the most robust on the planet. China’s advantage is the opposite: an opaque system of state direction and selective enforcement that no U.S. regulator is able to review with proper scrutiny. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s own Division of Corporation Finance has warned that PRC restrictions materially limit the commission’s ability to obtain the information necessary to protect investors. American firms play by the rules while their rivals exploit the gap.
This is not a hypothetical threat. One company’s 2025 SEC disclosure confirmed that 61 percent of its employees operated within mainland China, working for a subsidiary receiving government grants that explicitly required recipients to support the leadership of the CCP. Massachusetts regulators fined the firm $500,000 for compliance failures. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined it $3 million for inadequate due diligence and the company settled for $1.6 million. Neither penalty addressed the underlying national security exposure, but Congress is well-positioned to step in.
In March, a bipartisan coalition of 18 members from the Senate Banking Committee — led by Chairman Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) — sent a letter to the SEC demanding action on data exposure, broker-dealer accountability and the commission’s inability to examine operations inside China. The letter echoes a parallel House Select Committee investigation into fraudulent pump-and-dump schemes involving Chinese shell companies that, by one estimate, have erased over $16 billion in American investor capital since 2023.
The SEC’s Cross-Border Task Force has already issued more than a dozen trading suspensions of Asia-based companies since last September. The architecture of a response exists; what is missing is the urgency to match the scale of the threat.
At the Commerce Department, one of us spent four years at the center of the fight to protect American innovation and economic security. The Biden administration’s response was deliberate: segregate the drivers of strategic competition while maintaining the broader economic relationship with China — a “small yard, high fence” strategy of targeted restrictions rather than broad decoupling. Competition over technologies like semiconductors and artificial intelligence algorithms now unfolds within a single, contested economic and technological battlefield. The United States needs to expand the yard to enclose its financial services.
America’s technology-driven future cannot deliver on its promise if its financial underpinnings are left exposed. Protecting that future requires setting standards for transparency and security in the nation’s financial marketplace. The SEC must act. Congress must follow with hearings and legislation.
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