About Wind Information

Wind Information

Overview

Wind Information, known in Chinese as Wande Xinxi, is a Chinese financial data and software company headquartered in Shanghai. Its formal name is Wind Information Co., Ltd., and it is described by its own company profile as a leading integrated service provider of financial data, information and software, and as a leading company in financial software services. The company's best-known product is the Wind Financial Terminal, which is considered the largest Chinese domestic alternative to the Bloomberg Terminal. Where Bloomberg built its international reputation around a combined terminal, news and data service for global markets, Wind built an equivalent position inside China by concentrating on Chinese financial and securities data, on the institutions that trade and regulate those markets, and on delivery through professional terminal tools. Reuters described Wind in 2023 as China's biggest financial data provider and, citing estimates by the broker Guotai Junan Securities, as by far the biggest player in China's fast-growing market for financial data. The company is privately held, and that private status is itself part of its profile: unlike several of its listed domestic rivals, Wind has no stock exchange listing through which outside investors can follow its accounts in detail.

Founding and founder

Wind was founded in 1998 by the entrepreneur Lu Feng, who remained the company's chairman and its central figure. Reference listings record Lu Feng as both founder and chairman, and Reuters likewise reported that the company was founded in 1998 by entrepreneur Lu Feng and was privately held. The founding date places Wind's creation in a formative period for China's modern securities markets, when the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges were still young and when professional electronic data services for Chinese stocks, bonds and funds were only beginning to develop at scale. A company founded at that point, and focused from the start on building a complete and accurate large-scale financial data centre for China, was positioned to grow alongside the markets it served. As Chinese banks, brokerages, fund managers and insurers expanded, demand grew for a domestic terminal that could bring together market prices, company information, macroeconomic series and news in one place, in Chinese, and organised around Chinese instruments and Chinese regulatory disclosure. Wind's subsequent history is largely the story of meeting that demand more completely than its domestic competitors.

Headquarters and offices

Wind is headquartered in Shanghai, China's principal financial centre. Its own profile places its headquarters in the Shanghai International Finance Centre, known as Shanghai IFC, in the Lujiazui financial district, and earlier company descriptions likewise described it as headquartered in the Lujiazui Financial Center in Shanghai. Lujiazui, in Pudong across the Huangpu River from the old Bund, is the district that houses the Shanghai Stock Exchange area, major Chinese banks and securities firms, and the towers that symbolise China's financial opening. A headquarters there puts Wind physically among its core customers. Outside mainland China, Wind expanded its footprint to offices including Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and London, according to Reuters reporting, while reference listings specifically record offices in New York, London and Hong Kong outside China. That office network reflects the two directions of its business: serving Chinese institutions at home, and serving institutions abroad, and Chinese institutions operating abroad, that need authoritative data on China. The international offices also became the point at which Wind later encountered the data-access questions discussed below, because the users they served were based outside mainland China.

The Wind Financial Terminal

The Wind Financial Terminal is the product through which most users encounter the company. It is professional analysis software and a set of application tools for information retrieval, data extraction and analysis, and investment portfolio management, through which users can obtain timely, accurate and complete financial data and analysis on a 24-hour, seven-day basis, in the company's own description. In practice, terminal users are traders, analysts, portfolio managers, risk staff and researchers who need prices and reference data during trading hours and research material outside them. A 2014 announcement by IBM about Wind's terminals noted that they were used by traders to buy and sell stocks, bonds and other financial products, and that Wind's technology was present in virtually every bank and asset manager in the country at that time. The terminal's mobile form, the Wind Financial Terminal app, delivers real-time global market data across asset classes including stocks, bonds, funds, indices, derivatives, foreign exchange and macroeconomic material, supported for continuous access. The terminal model matters commercially because it is sticky: once an institution builds its research, compliance and trading workflows around one terminal's data structures and functions, switching to a rival requires retraining staff and rebuilding processes, which helps explain the durability of Wind's market position.

Data coverage

Wind's underlying asset is its database rather than any single screen. The company says that in the field of financial data it built a complete and accurate large-scale financial engineering and financial data centre based on financial and securities data in China, and that its data covers stocks, bonds, funds, foreign exchange, financial derivatives, commodities, macroeconomics and financial news. Library guides to the terminal describe the breadth behind that summary: coverage of listed companies in mainland China, including companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges and other Chinese quotation systems, listed companies in Hong Kong, and information on listed and upcoming companies in markets including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore and Japan. The Wind Economic Database, known as EDB, is a major component, covering macroeconomic and industry indicators. A Japan Exchange Group portal description of the EDB records more than 13 million indicators across more than 200 countries, thousands of subordinate regions and 21 primary industries, with sub-databases including China Macro, Global Macro, sector, fixed income, currency and commodity databases, and point-in-time data whose longest historical records date back to 1936. That depth of historical macroeconomic series is one reason Wind data is frequently cited by Chinese and English-language media, research reports and academic papers, as the company itself notes.

Customers and market position

Wind's customers are overwhelmingly institutional. The company says it serves securities companies, fund management corporations, insurance companies, banks, investment firms and media, and that it aims to satisfy different clients across the financial industry, including investment institutions, research institutions, academic institutions and regulatory agencies. A widely repeated measure of its penetration, published in its own company description and in the 2014 IBM announcement, is that Wind serves more than 90 percent of the financial enterprises in the Chinese market, including securities firms, fund management firms, insurance companies, banks and investment firms. That figure dates from that period and should be read as the company's stated reach rather than an independently audited current share, but it is consistent with later external descriptions of Wind's dominance. Reuters in 2023 called Wind by far the biggest player in China's financial data market, and the South China Morning Post and The Wall Street Journal both treated it as China's principal domestic alternative to Bloomberg. In a market where the main customers are a relatively concentrated set of licensed financial institutions, serving the great majority of them gives a data provider an entrenched position: its data becomes a common reference point for pricing, research and reporting across the industry.

Risk tools and technology partnerships

Wind's development was not limited to displaying prices and company filings. In August 2014, IBM announced that Shanghai Wind Information had selected IBM to help provide users in China with cloud-based analytics tools to better manage financial risks and meet regulatory requirements. Wind was to incorporate IBM's cloud-based risk management software, IBM Algo Risk Service on Cloud, and the locally installed IBM Algo One Risk Aggregator directly into its trading terminals, creating a hybrid solution that conducted sophisticated risk data processing in the cloud while keeping client position data protected and confidential within China, a requirement of Chinese law noted in the announcement. Jin Jian, a vice president of Shanghai Wind Information, was quoted in connection with the project. The episode illustrates two features of Wind's business. First, post-financial-crisis regulation was increasing the risk calculations financial institutions had to perform, and a terminal provider could expand by embedding those calculations in its product. Second, the architecture had to respect Chinese data rules even in 2014, with position data kept inside the country while processing used cloud services. That tension between international technology and Chinese data boundaries later became central to Wind's story.

Rivalry and the iFinD lawsuit

Wind's dominance was contested by domestic rivals, and the contest produced a notable legal case against Hithink RoyalFlush Information Network, the Hangzhou-based provider of the Tonghuashun retail platform and the iFinD institutional terminal. In 2012 Wind sued Hithink, stating in its lawsuit that the iFinD terminal infringed its intellectual property rights. In 2016 the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate Court ruled in favour of Wind, stating that Hithink had to cease operating the iFinD terminal and pay 3.35 million yuan to Wind in compensation. In December 2017 the Shanghai High People's Court upheld the ruling, but did not say whether Hithink could continue operating the iFinD terminal, which, according to Hithink, had been modified significantly since the lawsuit started, as Caixin Global reported at the time. The case is significant beyond its damages figure, which was small relative to the companies involved. It showed that the design, data organisation and functions of a financial terminal were treated as protectable commercial assets in China, and that Wind was prepared to litigate to defend the distinctiveness of the product on which its institutional business rested. iFinD nevertheless remained the closest domestic institutional rival product in the years that followed.

Official recognition

Wind's standing in China was publicly underlined in March 2019, when Li Qiang visited Wind's office and gave encouragement to the firm's employees, telling them to hold themselves to international standards, as reported in coverage cited by The Wall Street Journal. A visit of that kind functioned as an official endorsement of a privately held Chinese technology company operating in a strategically sensitive field, financial data. It also captured the expectation placed on Wind: to be a Chinese company, rooted in Chinese data and Chinese regulation, whose product quality was nevertheless measured against the international standard set by Bloomberg and other global vendors. That dual expectation — domestic reliability and international comparability — runs through Wind's history, from its Lujiazui headquarters and its New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore presence to the risk-technology partnership with IBM. Few Chinese financial information companies have been asked, in effect, to be both a national champion and a global-standard firm, and Wind's reputation rests on being the one most often described in those terms.

Data restrictions, bond pricing and the 2024 outage

Wind's later history shows the pressures on a dominant data provider in a tightening regulatory environment. On 15 March 2023, Wind temporarily stopped providing real-time bond pricing services after it was ordered by regulators to stop revealing bond prices; two days later the ban was reversed and Wind resumed the service, as the South China Morning Post reported. In May 2023 Reuters reported that Wind had told some customers late the previous year that it was restricting offshore users from accessing certain business and economic data as a result of the cybersecurity regulator's new data rules. Data made inaccessible to users outside mainland China from September 2022 included some home sale numbers, and the restrictions were reported to include business registry details such as company shareholding structures and ultimate controllers, and economic data such as home and land sales in certain cities. Sources told Reuters the changes followed instructions or new rules from the Cyberspace Administration of China, whose final data-export security review rules took effect on 1 September 2022; Wind responded in other reporting by stating that such changes were in line with standard practices of its global peers. On 8 January 2024, Wind suffered a technical malfunction that denied access to most of its users during trading hours, an outage the South China Morning Post said tested fragile sentiment in China's markets. That an outage at one private data company could be treated as a market event is perhaps the clearest measure of Wind's position: by then, its terminal was not merely a product used by China's financial industry, but part of the infrastructure through which that industry worked.