金融科技发展能否促进银行创新--信息赋能与产业竞争的视角

Can the Development of Fintech Promote Bank Innovation?From the Perspective of Information Enabling and Industry Competition

以金融科技为核心的数字化战略已成为中国金融体制改革的关键。金融科技能否发挥技术驱动金融创新的作用是一个值得探究的问题。本文选取2011-2019年中国177家商业银行面板数据,考察金融科技发展对中国商业银行创新的影响。研究发现,金融科技发展显著提升了商业银行的创新水平,使用工具变量法、Heckman两步法等缓解内生性后,结果依然稳健。机制分析结果表明,金融科技一方面缓解了银行个体面临的信息难题,提高了商业银行的创新“能力”,另一方面促进了产业层面的竞争度,增强了商业银行的创新“意愿”,这两种力量共同推动了金融创新水平的提升。异质性分析结果表明,较城市商业银行和农村商业银行而言,大型国有银行和股份制银行利用金融科技提高创新能力的作用更加明显;商业银行与研发团队规模大、创新能力强的金融科技公司合作,创新效应更为显著。进一步研究发现金融科技在促进金融创新的同时并没有放大银行风险。因此,本文认为作为全球金融科技发展领先的国家之一,中国应积极推动金融科技健康、有序发展。通过金融创新的不断深化,增强金融体系服务实体经济的能力,以解决不平衡不充分的发展问题。

Financial innovation is crucial to the development of financial systems,serving as a driving force for advancing financial services to the real economy and promoting endogenous economic growth.For Chinese commercial banks,the traditional profit model driven by interest spreads is increasingly unsustainable,given the complex macroeconomic environment,intense market competition,and stringent financial regulations.Therefore,there is an urgent need for these banks to accelerate financial innovation,offering more diversified and high-quality financial products and services to reshape their core competitiveness.Although technological investment in China’s banking sector has been on the rise in recent years,the transformation of technological achievements remains suboptimal due to constraints such as operational concepts,institutional mechanisms,and resource integration.As a result,commercial banks continue to face challenges,including a lack of product diversity,noticeable homogenization,and difficulties in meeting the needs of long-tail customers,signaling the need for further innovation.Amid the wave of a new technological revolution and industrial transformation,cutting-edge digital technologies such as big data,cloud computing,artificial intelligence,and blockchain have significantly accelerated innovation.These advancements have driven profound changes in the structure and organization of the financial system,with fintech-led integrated innovation emerging as a defining feature of the fourth financial revolution.However,the impact of emerging technologies on the industry is often multifaceted and uncertain.Scholars,both domestically and internationally,have yet to reach a consensus on fintech’s influence on traditional financial institutions.Some even argue that fintech could disrupt and ultimately replace traditional banking institutions by undermining their foundational existence.As China is one of the global leaders in fintech development,the question of whether fintech can fully realize its innovative potential in China warrants further investigation.Despite the significance of this issue,few scholars have explored the impact of fintech on financial innovation,and most existing research remains theoretical,lacking empirical evidence.Theoretically,on the one hand,digital technologies enhance commercial banks’ability to acquire and process information,enabling the financial sector to more accurately identify customer needs through multi-dimensional data,thereby improving the information environment and providing the technological foundation for financial innovation.On the other hand,fintech fosters competition in the banking sector and accelerates the restructuring of market dynamics.Faced with unpredictable and complex competitive environments,commercial banks are compelled to seek new ways to reshape themselves and gain competitive advantages,with innovation being the engine of sustained competitiveness.Consequently,the combined forces of information empowerment and competitive pressures directly drive financial innovation in traditional financial institutions.In this context,this paper examines the impact of fintech development on the innovation of Chinese commercial banks,using panel data from 177 banks in China between 2011 and 2019.The findings indicate that fintech development significantly enhances the innovation levels of commercial banks.Even after addressing endogeneity concerns through instrumental variable methods and Heckman’s two-step procedure,the results remain robust.Mechanism analysis reveals that fintech alleviates individual banks’information challenges,thereby improving their“ability”to innovate,while simultaneously promoting industry-wide competition,enhancing banks'“willingness”to innovate.Together,these forces drive financial innovation.Heterogeneity analysis shows that,compared to urban and rural commercial banks,large state-owned and jointstock banks benefit more from fintech in enhancing their innovation capabilities.Moreover,commercial banks that collaborate with fintech companies with larger R&D teams and stronger innovation capacities experience more significant innovation effects.Finally,this study finds that fintech promotes financial innovation without amplifying bank risks.As a global leader in fintech development,China should actively promote the healthy and orderly development of fintech to deepen financial innovation and enhance the financial system’s capacity to serve the real economy,addressing imbalanced and inadequate development.This paper contributes to the literature in several ways:First,in terms of indicator construction and measurement,this study captures the dynamics of bank-fintech collaboration by using the first event of a commercial bank’s partnership with an external fintech company,providing a direct reflection of fintech’s development in the banking sector.This serves as a valuable reference for future empirical research.Second,in mechanism analysis,this paper is the first to empirically test the financial innovation effects of fintech,revealing its underlying mechanisms from both information empowerment and industry competition perspectives.This offers direct empirical evidence for commercial banks to leverage advanced digital technologies to promote financial innovation,providing both theoretical and practical value for further reforms in the banking sector.Lastly,in examining influencing factors,this paper analyzes the heterogeneity of fintech companies’impact on bank innovation across different business models,as well as the differences in how various types of commercial banks utilize fintech for innovation.These findings enrich the existing literature and offer strategic guidance for commercial banks in choosing the type of fintech companies with which to collaborate to effectively seek competitive advantages and gain core competencies.