Do banks accumulate knowledge about corporate technology, and does it matter for

their lending? To answer this question, we combine corporate innovation with syndicated

loan data. We find that loans to firms sharing similar technologies with banks’

prior borrowers obtain lower loan spreads. We can rule out product market competition,

the value of their technology and ability to innovate, and/or numerous other firm

characteristics as alternative explanations. By estimating a structural bank-borrower

matching model and exploiting the consummation of bank mergers and acquisitions,

we can show that shocks to banks’ technology knowledge causally affect loan spreads.