Conference Agenda

As banks shift services online, elderly clients unable or unwilling to use internet banking risk losing access to financial services. We design and test training interventions to foster internet banking in a field experiment with more than 27,000 elderly non-adopters at a large German savings bank. Training take-up is strikingly low: only 2% of invited clients respond. Yet, conditional on participation, training is highly effective: the two-hour training program increases internet banking setup by 25 percentage points and raises online transactions by 13 percentage points – effects that persist four months after training completion. A follow-up survey with a broader sample of elderly non-adopters reveals why take-up is low despite sizable training effects: two-thirds of elderly non-adopters display persistent reluctance towards internet banking adoption, which is not sensitive to subtle changes in the framing of training invitations. The remaining third are constrained by a lack of skills and support, which could be overcome by our training intervention.

We study the effect of banks’ cross-selling on household credit. Using administrative register data on bank–household relationships in Denmark, we measure cross-selling via households’ holdings of noncredit products. Our identification strategy exploits plausibly exogenous shocks to cross-selling relationships resulting from bank mergers. We document the following findings. First, cross-selling increases credit access and lowers interest rates: treated households see loan amounts rise by about 22% and interest rates fall by roughly 60 basis points. Second, these effects are stronger in low-competition markets. Overall, our findings imply that cross-selling has an economically significant impact on household credit and can exacerbate credit inequality.

This paper examines whether modest tailoring of loan contracts can improve credit market outcomes. We conduct a randomized field experiment with a large fintech lender that varies loan due dates relative to borrowers’ salary paydays. Synchronizing repayment schedules with income cycles reduces delinquency by 29.1% in the experiment and 15.7% in the administrative data. Effects concentrate among liquidity-constrained borrowers: young, low-income, and low-credit-limit individuals. Tailored repayment timing generates substantial economic benefits: borrowers save on overdue penalties, lenders accelerate cash flows, and improved repayment increases future credit access. The benefits persist over time and strengthen with borrower experience. Overall, the findings show that contract tailoring can enhance fintech’s contribution to financial inclusion.