Big Tech, Fintech, and the Future of Credit

Lenders want to know that borrowers will pay them back. That means assessing creditworthiness before making a loan and then monitoring borrowers to ensure timely payment in full. Lenders have three principal tools for raising the likelihood of that firms will repay. First, they look for borrowers with a sufficiently large personal stake in their enterprise. Second, they look for firms with collateral that lenders can seize in the event of a default. Third, they obtain information on the firm’s current balance sheet, its historical revenue and profits, experience with past loans, and the like.

Unfortunately, this conventional approach to overcoming the challenges of asymmetric information is less effective for new firms that have both very short credit histories and very little in the way of physical collateral. As a result, these potential borrowers have trouble obtaining funds through standard channels. This is one reason that governments subsidize small business lending, and why entrepreneurs are forced to pledge their homes as collateral.

Well, new solutions have emerged to overcome this old problem. In this post we discuss how technology is increasing small firms’ access to credit. By using massive amounts of data to improve credit assessments, as well as real-time information and platform advantages to enforce repayment terms, technology companies appear to be doing what traditional lenders have not: making loans to millions of small businesses at attractive rates and experiencing remarkably low default rates.

The biggest advances are in places where financial systems are not meeting social needs….

Improving resilience: banks and non-bank intermediaries

Debt causes fragility. When banks lack equity funding, even a small adverse shock can put the financial system at risk. Fire sales can undermine the supply of credit to healthy firms, precipitating a decline in economic activity. The failure of key institutions can threaten the payments system. Authorities naturally respond by increasing required levels of equity finance, ensuring that intermediaries can weather severe conditions without damaging others.

Readers of this blog know that we are strong supporters of higher capital requirements: if forced to pick a number, we might choose a leverage ratio requirement in the range of 15% of total exposure (see here), roughly twice recent levels for the largest U.S. banks. But as socially desirable as high levels of equity finance might be, the fact is that they are privately costly. As a result, rather than limit threats to the financial system, higher capital requirements for banks have the potential to shift risky activities beyond the regulatory perimeter into non-bank intermediaries (see, for example here).

Has the increase of capital requirements since the financial crisis pushed risk-taking beyond the regulated banking system? So far, the answer is no. However, in some jurisdictions, especially the United States, the framework for containing systemic risk arising from non-bank financial institutions remains inadequate….

Higher capital requirements didn't slow the economy

During the debate over the 2010 Basel III regulatory reform, one of the biggest concerns was that higher capital requirements would damage economic growth. Pessimists argued that forcing banks to increase their capitalization would lower long-run growth permanently and that the transitional adjustment would impose an extra drag on the recovery from the Great Recession. Unsurprisingly, the private sector saw catastrophe, while the official sector was more positive...

Steve Cecchetti and Kim SchoenholtzDecember 15, 2014Capital requirements, Basel III, Credit, Deleveraging

Narrow Banks Won't Stop Bank Runs

Every financial crisis leads to a new call to restrict the activities of banks. One frequent response is to call for “narrow banks.” That is, change the legal and regulatory framework in a way that severely limits the assets that traditional deposit-taking banks can hold. One approach would require that all liabilities that are demandable at par be held in the form of deposits at the central bank. That is, accounts that can be withdrawn without notice and have fixed net asset value would face a 100% reserve requirement. The Depression-era “Chicago Plan” had this approach in mind.

Sources of growth: large and small, new and old

Everyone is pro-growth and pro-employment. So, when an economy stagnates and unemployment rises, there is always concern. In Europe, real GDP remains below where it was at the end of 2007. That is, the economies in the euro area and the broader European Union (EU) have not collectively returned to the level of economic activity they enjoyed more than six years ago! Unsurprisingly, as the real economy has languished, unemployment across the EU has risen, going from a low of below 7% to its current level of 10.6%.

Steve Cecchetti and Kim SchoenholtzApril 24, 2014Growth, Employment, Credit, SMEs

Commentary

Money, Banking, and Financial Markets