A Study On The Impact Of Fintech On Commercial Banks’ Risk-taking

With the deep integration of rapidly developing Internet technology and financial business,financial technology has emerged.The ever-changing financial technology has brought great development opportunities to the financial sector,but also accompanied by potential risks.Commercial banks are also bound to be affected by fintech.On the one hand,commercial banks use fintech empowerment to alleviate information asymmetry,increase the number of tail group customers,increase commercial banks’ profit income,improve their operational efficiency and reduce their risk taking;on the other hand,fintech gives rise to a large number of innovative products,services and business forms,which reduce banks’ franchise value,lower their profitability and increase their risk taking.Therefore,in this context,it is important to explore what kind of impact the development of fintech has on commercial banks’ risk taking to promote their healthy development and avoid systemic risks.Firstly,this paper systematically composes the previous related literature,clarifies the connotation of fintech,summarizes the measurement methods of fintech,and also composes and summarizes the related studies between fintech,bank risk taking and banking competition,and puts forward hypotheses combining the theoretical bases of information asymmetry theory,long tail theory and financial innovation.Secondly,in the empirical analysis part,the panel data of 106 commercial banks of different types from 2013 to 2020 are selected as the research object,and the number of relevant news is searched by bank name plus keywords using Python crawler technology to construct the individual bank’s fintech index,calculate the Lerner index to measure banking competition as a mediating variable,and adopt the fixed-effects model to provide a comprehensive analysis on the impact of fintech on The empirical tests on the impact and heterogeneity of fintech on commercial banks’ risk-taking show that(1)the enabling effect of fintech is greater than the crowding-out effect and can significantly reduce the risk-taking level of commercial banks.(2)Heterogeneity exists among different types of commercial banks.For large state-owned banks,joint-stock banks and urban commercial banks,Fin Tech has a significant impact on reducing their risktaking,while for rural commercial banks,there is no significant correlation between Fin Tech and their risk-taking.(3)There is also heterogeneity across economic development regions,with a significant correlation between the level of financial technology development and commercial banks’ risk-taking in the eastern and western regions,but no significant correlation between the two in the central region.(4)Competition in the banking industry plays a partly mediating role between fintech and bank risk-taking,i.e.,the development of fintech increases competition in the banking industry,and the increase of competition in the banking industry produces a "competition-stabilization" effect,which further reduces bank risk-taking.Innovations of this paper:(1)Improvement of Fin Tech index.Using Python crawler technology to build a fintech lexicon from four dimensions of direct search,technical support,fund payment and financial intermediary services from the individual level of banks,the number of related news releases is counted by the combination of bank names and fintech keywords,and the fintech index is synthesized to more reasonably quantify the level of fintech development of each bank.(2)Innovation in research perspective.By calculating the Lerner index to measure the competition in the banking industry,combining fintech,banking competition and risk taking,to examine the indirect role of banking competition in the impact of fintech on banks’ risk-taking,and analyze the "fintech-bank competition-bank risk taking--The mechanism of"fintech-banking competition-bank risk-taking" is analyzed.