Summary:
Enhancing supply chain efficiency has become a strategic imperative for strengthening China's global economic competitiveness and ensuring economic security in the context of external shocks and domestic structural transformation. While existing literature predominantly examines FinTech from the supply side, emphasizing how banks and FinTech firms reshape credit allocation, this study shifts to the corporate demand side and investigates whether proactive corporate FinTech investment influences supply chain efficiency. We posit a novel mechanism that moves beyond the conventional financing-constraints narrative: Fin Tech investment enables firms to shift from passive relief to proactive optimization of their internal credit architecture. We further extend the analysis to the network level, exploring the synergistic interaction between Fin Tech investment and supply chain finance. Using a hand-collected dataset of FinTech-related job postings by Chinese listed firms from 2010 to 2022, we construct a firm-level measure of substantive FinTech investment. This metric captures genuine resource commitment, by treating hiring talent as the critical enabler of technological adoption, thereby avoiding measurement errors and “free-rider” issues inherent in aggregate indices or patent proxies. OLS estimates with firm and year fixed effects yield strong evidence that FinTech investment significantly enhances supply chain efficiency. This result is robust to a battery of robustness checks, including instrumental variable estimation, alternative specifications, and different estimators, leaving the baseline findings unchanged. In our mechanism analysis, we identify a fourfold pathway through which FinTech investment systematically optimizes the firm's credit system: (1) increasing credit availability by mitigating information asymmetries and expanding financing channels; (2) enhancing credit flexibility by accelerating the adjustment of capital structure and refining the choice of credit maturities; (3)reducing direct and indirect credit costs by strengthening market competition and lowering risk premiums; and (4) mitigating credit risk through real-time monitoring and predictive analytics that lower default probabilities. Collectively, these four channels constitute a systematic upgrade from passive borrowing to active credit architecture management, which significantly extends the conventional unidimensional narrative of financing constraints. Crucially, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive effect is significantly more pronounced among smaller firms, growth-stage enterprises, those in highly competitive industries, and firms located in cities with lower traditional financial institution density and more favorable business environments. This pattern underscores the inclusive, equalizing nature of FinTech-driven efficiency gains, suggesting it serves as a compensatory mechanism in regions underserved by conventional banking while thriving in institutional contexts marked by sound rule of law. Extending our analysis to the supply chain network, we find evidence of spillover effects. The internal credit optimization generated by FinTech investment amplifies the effectiveness of supply chain finance. Core firms with advanced FinTech capabilities can build shared digital infrastructures such as dynamic discounting platforms and blockchain-based receivable confirmation systems. These infrastructures integrate transaction, logistics, and fund flows across tiers, enhancing the operating efficiency of all participating entities, particularly upstream SMEs facing themost severe financing frictions. This reveals a critical value-expansion trajectory: from serving the internal firm to reshaping the external ecosystem. This paper makes three primary contributions. First, it introduces a demand-side perspective on FinTech, documenting how firms actively harness technology to transform financial operations, complementing the vast supply-side literature. Our job-posting-based metric offers a precise and forward-looking proxy for real FinTech activity. Second, it extends FinTech research into supply chain management, demonstrating that technology's benefits transcend individual firm performance to enhance inter-organizational coordination and network resilience. Third, theoretically, it introduces a dynamic “credit system optimization” framework, replacing the static “financing constraints” approach, and articulates a clear internal-to-external value diffusion mechanism with four distinct transmission channels. Our findings carry significant policy implications. They advocate for policies encouraging corporate technology upgrading through tax incentives, digital infrastructure development supporting inter-firm data sharing, and regulatory frameworks fostering synergies between FinTech and supply chain finance, especially in underserved regions.
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