Summary:
In recent years, fintech has developed rapidly in China, which has had a huge impact on traditional financial institutions such as banks. Fintech companies have not only pushed up commercial banks' costs on the liability side (Qiu et al., 2018) and squeezed their market share (Buchak et al., 2018) but have also increased banks' risk-taking (Guo and Shen, 2019). However, on the other hand, the development of fintech offers opportunities to commercial banks to transform and upgrade their business and service models and technologies. Following this trend, commercial banks began to deploy fintech strategies, using technologies such as big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and Internet finance to improve transaction efficiency and optimize user experience. In this context, it is of theoretical and practical importance to explore Chinese commercial banks' deployment of fintech strategies, and examine how these have promoted internal changes and digital transformation. To empirically test the impact of commercial banks' deployment of fintech on their credit risk and performance, we consider four types of commercial banks as research samples (state-owned banks, joint-stock banks, city commercial banks, and rural commercial banks) and manually collect data on strategic cooperation between 323 commercial banks and fintech enterprises in China from 2005 to 2019. The data come from public reports on banks' official websites. As a robustness test, the number of collaborations reported in “Strategic Cooperation between Banks and Technology Enterprises” in the WiseNews database is used as an alternative measure. The bank financial data and macroeconomic data in this paper mainly come from the WIND database and CSMAR database, and missing data are supplemented from banks' annual reports. First, to examine the impact on bank credit risk of banks' deployment of fintech through bank-enterprise cooperation, the dynamic panel SYS-GMM estimation method is used in regression analysis. We also explore the transmission mechanism and bank heterogeneity of the impact of banks' deployment of fintech on credit risk. Second, we analyze how banks' deployment of fintech affects their performance. On this basis, we further explore the mechanism and loan structure heterogeneity of banks' deployment of fintech and its effect on performance. We obtain the following results. First, bank-fintech enterprise cooperation can reduce credit risk and improve bank performance. Second, bank-fintech enterprise cooperation reduces bank credit risk through the channels of bank innovation capability and competitiveness. At the same time, bank type and capital level show heterogeneity in the effect of banks' deployment of fintech on their credit risk. Third, banks improve their performance by deploying fintech through four channels: alleviating bank credit risk, improving inclusive financial service, enhancing operational management capability, and expanding intermediary business. The impact of banks' deployment of fintech on credit risk and performance is heterogeneous in loan structure. Based on the research findings, policy recommendations are as follows: First, commercial banks in China should continue to deploy fintech strategies. Second, because the effects of fintech deployment differ between different types of banks, commercial banks should choose appropriate fintech development plans based on their risk management, business structure, and corporate governance characteristics. Third, although the deployment of fintech can reduce credit risk and improve performance, banks should be alert to potential negative effects. Finally, supervision methods must timely adapt to developing financial digital transformation, and financial supervision requires stronger technological capability. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, this paper studies banks' fintech strategy and focuses on strategic cooperation between banks and fintech enterprises. Second, this paper studies the impact of banks' deployment of fintech on credit risk and performance, providing empirical evidence of the viability of “technology-based” banks. Third, this paper identifies the mechanism by which bank-fintech enterprise cooperation affects banks' credit risk and performance. Given how extensively fintech has impacted the traditional banking industry, this paper not only helps unpack the microeconomic consequences of commercial banks' use of fintech but also provides empirical evidence to assist in formulating economic policies and improving the quality and efficiency of financial services.
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