We study the spending response of first-time borrowers to an overdraft facility and elicit their preferences, beliefs, and motives through a FinTech application. Users increase their spending permanently, lower their savings rate, and reallocate spending from non-discretionary to discretionary...

We discuss prospects for innovation in consumer payment instruments. We discuss recent research into consumer payments and what can be learned about consumer behavior towards new payment options. We consider three new innovations in payments: mobile payments, faster payments and digital...

The FinTech sector has begun to grow rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa. I document far greater adoption of social media, digital currency, ride sharing, and other FinTech applications in countries with a common law legal heritage compared to those with a civil law system, suggesting that legal...

Developing country lenders are taking advantage of fintech tools to create fully digital loans on mobile phones. Using administrative and survey data, we study the take up and impacts of one of the most popular digital loan products in the world, M-Shwari in Kenya. While 34% of those eligible...

New technology promises to expand the supply of financial services to borrowers poorly served by the banking system. Does it succeed? We study the response of FinTech to financial services demand created by the introduction of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We find that FinTech is...

This paper studies the economic impact of the emergence of FinTech platforms on financial intermediation. In China, platform distributions of mutual funds emerged in 2012 and grew quickly into a formidable presence. Utilizing the staggered fund entrance onto platforms, we find markedly increased...

Banks are unique in that they combine the production of liquid claims with loans. They can replicate most of what FinTech firms can do, but FinTech firms benefit from an uneven playing field in that they are less regulated than banks. The uneven playing field enables non-bank FinTech firms to...

Discrimination in lending can occur either in face-to-face decisions or in algorithmic scoring. We provide a workable interpretation of the courts' legitimate-business-necessity defense of statistical discrimination. We then estimate the extent of racial/ethnic discrimination in the largest...

This paper assesses the potential impact of FinTech on the finance industry, focusing on financial stability and access to services. I document first that financial services remain surprisingly expensive, which explains the emergence of new entrants. I then argue that the current regulatory...

We analyze the information content of the digital footprint – information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website – for predicting consumer default. Using more than 250,000 observations, we show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital...