P2P LENDING PLATFORM EVALUATION OF OPERATING PECULIARITIES

Rapidly evolving financial technologies (FinTech) are changing established, time-tested financial services delivery and competition strategies. The growing diversity of financial services is evolving entrepreneurial ecosystems, making it a challenge for all financial market participants. One of the largest Fintech markets in Lithuania is the lending market. This market acts as an alternative to traditional financial institutions’ credit and distinguish by its relatively new and developing. Therefore, the research aims to evaluate the activities and peculiarities of operating lending platforms in Lithuania. The analysis uses P2P lending market development indicators, return and risk identified and analyzed in the research. The study revealed that the portfolio of consumer loans provided through operators of P2P lending platforms is growing steadily every year. AB NEO Finance maintains the same tendencies and secures a leading position in the Lithuanian P2P lending market. AB NEO Finance stands out as the only one of all P2P lending platforms, because it is listed on Lithuania’s stock exchange. It covers more than half of the P2P lending market regarding the amount and number of disbursed consumer loans. Were found that the remaining loan repayment is proliferating in the P2P lending market. However, AB NEO Finance is experiencing a lower number of overdue payment days than the P2P lending market, which indicates a lower risk. Keywords: P2P lending platform, AB NEO Finance, P2P lending market. JEL codes: G2

Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.

The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto- peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services. The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no. EP/K012304/1)

Community Bank Assessment of Agricultural Portfolio Risk Exposure: The Literature and the Methods in Use

Agricultural Finance,

Crowdlending: mapping the core literature and research frontiers

[EN] Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending uses two-sided platforms to link borrowers with a crowd of lenders. Despite considerable diversity in crowdlending research, studies in this area typically focus on several common research topics, including information asymmetries, social capital, communication channels, and rating-based models. This young research field is still expanding. However, its importance has increased considerably since 2018. This rise in importance suggests that P2P lending may offer a promising new scientific research field. This paper presents a bibliometric study based on keyword co-occurrence, author and reference co-citations, and bibliographic coupling. The paper thus maps the key features of P2P lending research. Although many of the most cited papers are purely financial, some focus on behavioral finance. The trend in this field is toward innovative finance based on new technologies. The conclusions of this study provide valuable insight for researchers, managers, and policymakers to understand the current and future status of this field. The variables that affect new financial contexts and the strategies that promote technology-based financial environments must be investigated in the future.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.Ribeiro-Navarrete, S.; Piñeiro-Chousa, J.; López-Cabarcos, MÁ.; Palacios Marqués, D. (2022). Crowdlending: mapping the core literature and research frontiers. Review of Managerial Science. 16(8):2381-2411. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-021-00491-82381241116

Crowdlending: mapping the core literature and research frontiers

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending uses two-sided platforms to link borrowers with a crowd of lenders. Despite considerable diversity in crowdlending research, studies in this area typically focus on several common research topics, including information asymmetries, social capital, communication channels, and rating-based models. This young research field is still expanding. However, its importance has increased considerably since 2018. This rise in importance suggests that P2P lending may offer a promising new scientific research field. This paper presents a bibliometric study based on keyword co-occurrence, author and reference co-citations, and bibliographic coupling. The paper thus maps the key features of P2P lending research. Although many of the most cited papers are purely financial, some focus on behavioral finance. The trend in this field is toward innovative finance based on new technologies. The conclusions of this study provide valuable insight for researchers, managers, and policymakers to understand the current and future status of this field. The variables that affect new financial contexts and the strategies that promote technology-based financial environments must be investigated in the futureOpen Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer NatureS

Cluster analysis of development of alternative finance models depending on the regional affiliation of countries

The article examines the hypothesis about the existence of regional peculiarities in the development of alternative financing models (such as p2p consumer lending, p2p business lending, p2p real estate lending, balance sheet business lending, balance sheet consumer lending, equity-based crowdfunding, reward-based crowdfunding, real estate crowdfunding, profit sharing crowdfunding, donation-based crowdfunding, invoice trading, debt-based securities). According to an alternative hypothesis, due to the high integration of international financial markets, there are no regional peculiarities of the development of alternative financing models. The cluster analysis tools allow verifying these hypotheses. The cluster analysis methods used, such as tree clustering, k-means clustering, and two-way joining, demonstrate the lack of links between the country's regional affiliation and the degree of development of certain types of alternative financing in it. The key factors affecting the formation of clusters are volumes of peer-to-peer consumer lending and business lending, as well as the volume of invoice trading. According to the results of the research, the authors conclude that it is necessary to find other factors, apart from the regional features, which influence the ratio in the development of certain types of alternative financing in different countries

Financial Fitness Education for Potential Homebuyers: A Start-Up Guide for NeighborWorks Organizations

Financial fitness education is a critical piece of community development, given today's socioeconomic climate consisting of the deregulation of government institutions and the increasing complexity of financial services. These changes are occurring when personal savings are low and bankruptcy rates are high, with 1.35 million filings in 1997.[1] Twelve million households, one-half of which receive public assistance, do not have bank accounts.[2] Subsequently, in an ever more difficult financial system through which to navigate, there remains a significant number of novice consumers, who would benefit greatly from financial fitness education.The financial system is not only complex but also laden with institutional barriers and potential pitfalls. Over the years, access to legitimate financial institutions and credit in low-income neighborhoods has become increasingly limited, whereby local bank branches have been replaced by expensive fringe banking outlets, such as check-cashing stores, payday loan outlets and pawnshops.Moreover, some residents face cultural or language barriers that prevent them from fully accessing appropriate financial services. Other dangers include consumer scams and schemes, as well as predatory lending practices -- high-cost loans targeted to people who cannot afford to repay them. Financial fitness education can help families become more aware of common pitfalls and thus avoid them while helping them to learn the financial management and planning skills needed to make the most of their income, savings and assets. Such education is vital for low- and moderate-income families who are fulfilling basic needs currently but are precariously positioned to overestimate the reach of their income, with little or no savings as a cushion.Recent changes in the national economy and public policy have led to a rise in the number of organizations developing and delivering financial fitness education. Approximately 20 formal curricula are in circulation around the country, being used by Cooperative Extension and education organizations; government agencies; consumer, nonprofit and community organizations; as well as private financial institutions and credit agencies. These organizations often share the objective of helping people to choose and use financial services successfully.Developing an effective financial fitness education program that will help local constituents move beyond fulfilling basic needs to accumulating savings -- and even assets -- while avoiding all of the perils along the way requires careful planning. Since each community has a unique target population, goals and resources, there cannot be a "one size fits all" program. Rather, an organization needs to develop a program that matches its goals along with the needs of the target population. This start-up guide is designed to help NeighborWorks organizations analyze the local need and their internal capacity for developing a financial fitness education program to increase consumers' money management skills, and in turn, to enable previously underserved markets to attain homeownership

FinTech Innovation: Review and Future Research Directions

This paper aims to survey the most recent theoretical and empirical literature on FinTech innovations in the financial sector. The purpose of this review is to investigate how FinTech Innovations are altering and reshaping the universe of financial service providers, and challenging traditional business models and infrastructures. This study summarizes the opportunities and challenges of FinTech Innovations and the implications to the legacy incumbent financial services companies. FinTech innovation fusions technological capabilities potentially provide innovative financial products and services to foster financial inclusion, streamline processes, and lower costs to clients. FinTech can bring greater competition and diversity in financial services. Further, this research interprets the findings from the lens of institutional theory to advance the theoretical understanding of social changes facilitated by FinTech innovations in revolutionary areas in banking (lending, payment), security trading (real-time settlement, automated investment), and insurance (personalized experience). The investigation points out the regulatory concerns highlighted in the scholarly works, suggesting collaboration is critical to enable multi-stakeholders to anticipate and foster pro-innovative, transparent regulations to deliver meaningful benefits to innovation and financial inclusion. Lastly, this review identifies future research areas to further enrich knowledge to create a future-proof, more efficient, and resilient financial ecosystem to enhance financial stability in the digital era

FINTECHS AND THE NEW WAVE OF FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES

The financial services industry is undergoing a massive transformation similar to what was observed when other industries underwent digitization. The FinTech revolution has given rise to a vast number of technology-oriented market entrants who challenge many parts of the financial services industry. This research seeks to provide a better understanding of how FinTechs across various business functions fundamentally impact the value chain in this industry. To this end, we built on top of financial intermediation theory, and developed a taxonomy of FinTechs’ intermediating functions. The following hierarchical clustering analysis identified six archetypes of FinTech intermediaries as observed in the real world, i.e. the different ways in which FinTechs across business functions act as financial intermediaries by transforming assets, reducing transaction cost, and alleviating information asymmetries. Finally, we discuss how FinTechs impact financial intermediation in itself, and to what extent the notion of FinTechs disintermediating the financial value chain is accurate