In recent years, Internet finance, such as third-party payment, P2P lending platforms,
has been developing rapidly. Fintech promoted by emerging technologies such as Block-
chain, artificial intelligence and 5G is in the ascendant. They have a greatly impact on
the business scope, business model, and risk behavior of traditional Banks. In the face
of the shock, the big banks and small and medium-sized banks show a big differences
in their risk-taking. Therefore, we mainly focus on the risk-taking behavior of small and
medium-sized banks affected by the development of Fintech.
In this article, we focus on the impact of Fintech development on the risk-taking of
small and medium banks. At present, foreign research mainly focuses on two aspects.
Firstly, some researchers suggest that the development of Fintech will change the busi-
ness model of commercial banks, increase the risk-taking behavior of commercial banks
of regulatory arbitrage and technological advantages to make the vulnerability of the
a challenge to the traditional financial industry, but it can also be turned into an opportunity
because it has greater flexibility in some areas and can provide better functions and services
great role in the relationship between finance and banking, and it has gradually penetrated
into places where traditional financial institutions are underserved. The development of
Fintech can improve the information asymmetry of traditional banks, reduce the transac-
tion friction costs of banks, improve the risk management level of banks, and increase the
Chen et al.
financial technology innovation, they believe that most financial technology innovations
bring great value to innovators; however, when this technology is ‘disruptive technology’,
it has a negative impact on the financial industry.
From domestic practice, on the business scale and the scene applications, China’s
Fintech (or digital finance) in the world is in a leading position. Moreover, Fintech has
impacted the banking industry. On the one hand, the Chinese banking industry is facing
the impact of interest rate liberalization and profit decline caused by the narrowing interest-
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rate spread. On the other hand, it is also affected by economic transformation, Internet
development, and financial innovations (
Guo and Liang 2016
). There are many web-
and data-based financial products and services that customers cannot obtain from their
banks or similar providers. The offerings provided by these companies already range
from digital payment solutions and information services, savings and deposit-taking right
through to modern online banking, multi-channel consultation (such as Robo-Advisor)
and securities trading services (
Dapp 2014
;
Gomber et al. 2018
). For instance, internet
wealth management products (A class of financial products purchased through the Internet
platform), such as Yu’eBao (It is a cash management tool in the era of mobile Internet,
which absorbs users’ fund and pay them interest daily. In addition to financial functions,
Yu’eBao can also be directly used for shopping, transfer, payment, repayment and other
consumer payments), have intensified competition for bank deposits, and third-party
payments, such as Alipay (a third-party payment app. In addition to providing convenient
payment, transfer, collection and other basic functions, it can also quickly complete credit
card repayment, charging charges, water, electricity, coal charges, and other services), have
intensified competition in bank payment business. Faced with this shock, banks may
achieve higher profits by increasing risk-taking behavior. As
Shen and Pin
(
2015
) points
out, the impact of the development of Internet finance on Banks’ risk-taking presents a
‘U’-shaped trend, which first decreases and then increases. They also believe that facing
the impact of Internet finance, bank risk-taking behaviors will differ in terms of ownership
and scale. Some researchers have also examined the heterogeneous impact of Fintech on
risk-taking behavior of different banks (
Yao and Song 2020
).
It can be found from the literature review that research on Fintech and bank risk-
taking is increasingly abundant, but there is still room for expansion in existing research
(
Petter and Dean 2009
;
Shen and Pin 2015
). Firstly, existing studies have focused more on
the impact of Internet financial development and less on the impact of financial technology.
The development of Fintech is mainly divided into Fintech IT stage (version 1.0 of Fintech),
internet finance stage (version 2.0 of Fintech) and Fintech stage (version 3.0 of Fintech).
Internet finance is the version 2.0 of Fintech (1990–2010), which mainly using internet
technology for financial services on the scene and it is a “scale-driven financial model”.
The main landmark events at this stage are: the emergence of mobile payment appeared
in 1990; E*TRADE, the first internet broker in the United States, was established in 1992;
internet equity crowdfunding came out in 2003. In the version 3.0 of Fintech (2011–present),
the internet is no longer the main driving force to promote the development of financial
technology, but makes full use of various cutting-edge digital technologies (new infor-
mation technology represented by big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and
blockchain) to achieve financial functions. Moreover, it is a ‘data driven financial model’.
Its landmark events include: the world’s first blockchain platform Ling was released on
the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in October 2015. Simply understand, compared to internet
finance, Fintech has more prominent technical characteristics (
Huang and Huang 2018
).
Secondly, the bank samples studied include almost all types of commercial Banks, such
as state-owned large commercial banks, joint-stock commercial banks, urban commercial
banks, and rural commercial banks. As mentioned earlier, in the face of the impact of new
technologies, the risk-taking behaviors of large banks and small and medium-sized banks
will also be quite different. We mainly focus on small and medium-sized banks, and further
examine their risk behavior. Thirdly, existing studies have proved that the development
of Fintech affects the channels and mechanisms of bank risk-taking (
Pi and Zhao 2014
;
Xie and Zou 2012
). These channels include: deposit structure and the cost of paying
interest; administrative expenses and capital costs; risk management, operating efficiency,
profitability, and risk contagion. We believe that these channels can be further studied
and analyzed.
Based on the above considerations, our work select the annual report data of 155 local
banks from 2011 to 2016 and the prefecture-level digital financial index compiled by the
Digital Finance Research Center of Peking University (the index uses Ant Financial’s
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underlying data on trading accounts to show the level of Fintech development level in
various regions of China from multiple dimensions) to examine the causal relationship
between Fintech and risk exposure of small and medium banks. This paper intends
to further explore the mechanism of Fintech’s impact on banks’ risk-taking from the
perspective of internal interest margin of banks, management cost channels, external market
competition, and the channel of residents’ willingness to save. Moreover we will deeply
analyze the heterogeneity of Fintech impact on risk-taking of small and medium banks.
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