Substitution or complementarity between “soft” information and “hard” information: why and which effect on bank profitability?

The Basel II committee set up directives encouraging banks to use internal scores in order to assess the risk of their customers. This new form of information competes with the existing ones. SMEs are most concerned by these new stakes, due to the lack of transparency. The aim of this paper is to understand the determinants of the choice between substitution and complementarity between the two types of information: “soft” and “hard”, to test a potential effect of this choice on the banking performance and to describe which variables are involved in the decision-making process. The originality of this work is to try to quantify the information costs and to use it as a variable which is affecting the adopted choice.