Conference Agenda
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 15th Sept 2026, 08:43:13am CEST
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Daily Overview |
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BIS: Digital Innovation and the Future Financial System Location: LR M0.1 (Floor 0) Session Chair: Sebastian Doerr, Bank for International Settlements | |
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ID: 599
Technology, Online Banks, and Credit Market Segmentation 1: University of Bologna; 2: Harvard Business School; 3: USI Lugano/Swiss Finance Institute; 4: Leibniz Institute for Financial Research, SAFE; 5: CEPR; 6: NBER How does online bank expansion (digital-only depository institutions that originate loans without human intermediation) affect consumer credit markets? Using loan-level data from Germany, we show that online banks cherry-pick low-risk borrowers, generating adverse selection on traditional banks. We document three facts. First, the market is segmented across lender types. Online banks serve the lowest-risk borrowers, traditional banks the medium-risk segment, and fintechs the highest-risk segment. Second, online banks attract these borrowers by offering substantially lower rates, an advantage that diminishes with risk. Using historical branch density as an instrument, we isolate the supply-side mechanism of this pattern. Third, traditional banks more exposed to online bank expansion experience a deterioration in their borrower pool and charge higher rates as a result. A parsimonious model with lenders who observe the same application information but use it differently rationalizes these facts. Traditional banks use coarse pricing, a legacy of costly manual underwriting for a standardized product, while online banks use finer pricing and cherry-pick the best borrowers from within traditional banks' pricing cells. Our findings highlight that technological development in credit markets can generate important distributional consequences.
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