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Working Paper
The Impact of Fintech Lending on Credit Access for U.S. Small Businesses
Small business lending (SBL) plays an important role in funding productive investment and fostering local economic growth. Recently, nonbank lenders have gained market share in the SBL market in the United States, especially relative to community banks. Among nonbanks, fintech lenders have become particularly active, leveraging alternative data for their own internal credit scoring. We use proprietary loan-level data from two fintech SBL platforms (Funding Circle and LendingClub) to explore the characteristics of loans originated pre-pandemic (2016‒2019). Our results show that fintech SBL ...
Working Paper
Do Fintech Lenders Penetrate Areas That Are Underserved by Traditional Banks?
Supersedes Working Paper 17-17 Fintech has been playing an increasing role in shaping financial and banking landscapes. In this paper, we use account-level data from LendingClub and Y-14M data reported by U.S. banks with assets over $50 billion to examine whether the fintech lending platform could expand credit access to consumers. We find that LendingClub?s consumer lending activities have penetrated areas that may be underserved by traditional banks, such as in highly concentrated markets and in areas that have fewer bank branches per capita. We also find that the portion of LendingClub ...
Working Paper
CONSUMER LENDING EFFICIENCY:COMMERCIAL BANKS VERSUS A FINTECH LENDER
We compare the performance of unsecured personal installment loans made by traditional bank lenders with that of LendingClub, using a stochastic frontier estimation technique to decompose the observed nonperforming loans into three components. The first is the best-practice minimum ratio that a lender could achieve if it were fully efficient at credit-risk evaluation and loan management. The second is a ratio that reflects the difference between the observed ratio (adjusted for noise) and the minimum ratio that gauges the lender?s relative proficiency at credit analysis and loan monitoring. ...
Working Paper
Fintech Lending: Financial Inclusion, Risk Pricing, and Alternative Information
Fintech has been playing an increasing role in shaping financial and banking landscapes. Banks have been concerned about the uneven playing field because fintech lenders are not subject to the same rigorous oversight. There have also been concerns about the use of alternative data sources by fintech lenders and the impact on financial inclusion. In this paper, we explore the advantages/disadvantages of loans made by a large fintech lender and similar loans that were originated through traditional banking channels. Specifically, we use account-level data from the Lending Club and Y-14M bank ...
Working Paper
A Survey of Fintech Research and Policy Discussion
The intersection of finance and technology, known as fintech, has resulted in the dramatic growth of innovations and has changed the entire financial landscape. While fintech has a critical role to play in democratizing credit access to the unbanked and thin-file consumers around the globe, those consumers who are currently well served also turn to fintech for faster services and greater transparency. Fintech, particularly the blockchain, has the potential to be disruptive to financial systems and intermediation. Our aim in this paper is to provide a comprehensive fintech literature survey ...