Tag Archives: Peer-to-peer lending

Regulation Catches Up with Fintech

The Economist reports that regulation catches up with peer-to-peer lending:

Meanwhile, a case working its way through the courts may subject P2P loans to state usury laws, from which banks with a national charter are exempt. That would prevent the P2P firms from lending to the riskiest borrowers in much of America. In addition, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency, announced this month that it would begin accepting complaints about P2P consumer lending.

Rates of delinquency are rising as well.

Fintech Competition for Banks

In a series of articles, The Economist reports about technology companies that compete with traditional banks in areas ranging from lending to payments and wealth management.

The introductory article refers to AngelList and references reports by Goldman Sachs (The Future of Finance, copy posted here), BCG and Accenture. And it highlights two factors driving the structural change which I have also emphasized in a recent article: Technology and vanishing trust in banks. The other articles cover:

Updates—some more firms in the business:

CreditGate24.

“Bankensektor im Umbruch (Structural Changes in Banking),” FuW, 2015

Finanz und Wirtschaft, April 18, 2015. PDF. Ökonomenstimme, April 20, 2015. HTML.

  • Banks increasingly face competition in bread-and-butter businesses like term deposits, lending and payments.
  • Two trends shape the sector’s changes: Falling trust in banks, both at the political level and by individual clients; and the rise of the internet.
  • Trust has been squandered. But with cheap access to information, it also has lost importance.
  • Asymmetric information in financial markets might become less of a friction. This could turn into an existential threat for banks.
  • When trust is less important and technology more versatile, increasing returns to scale in the provision of financial services might be a thing of the past. And so the universal bank. New regulatory and tax regimes could foster the process of structural change.

Here are some links to background information: