Scholar4AI

← Research ideas

SeedPublished 2026-10-26

Did fintech make banking more competitive?

Bank competition appears on 68 recent papers, but only 19 bank-competition papers carry a fintech, digital or platform keyword. Fintech lenders and digital banks were supposed to erode banks' market power. Did loan and deposit margins actually fall where they entered, and for whom?

financebankingcompetition

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 75 papers carry a bank-competition, bank-market-power or banking-market-structure keyword (53 in finance journals, 20 in economics), with "bank competition" on 68. Only 19 of them also carry a fintech, digital, big-tech, platform or mobile keyword (fintech 7, digital finance 4, digital banking 4), although "fintech" appears on 189 papers in the archive.

Questions#

  • In regions where fintech lenders gained share, did banks' loan rates and deposit margins narrow, or did fintech take only the borrowers banks did not want?
  • Did big-tech platforms (Ant, Tencent, Mercado Pago) raise competition, or build new market power of their own?
  • Does fintech competition make banks take more risk, as the old competition–fragility view would predict?

Data that could help#

Regional fintech lending volumes (HMDA, platform disclosures, China's digital finance index), bank-level margins and risk measures, and the timing of fintech entry.

Next step#

Relate the change in county-level bank loan spreads to fintech mortgage and personal-loan market shares over 2015–2025.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
bank competition6#306197
fintech11#102503

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/fintech-entry-and-bank-competition.md

← Gamification from trading apps to workplaces · The first great succession of China's private firms →

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Did fintech make banking more competitive?. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/fintech-entry-and-bank-competition

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-fintech-entry-and-bank-competition,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Did fintech make banking more competitive?},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/fintech-entry-and-bank-competition}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

Free to reuse for non-commercial purposes with attribution (CC BY-NC 4.0).