O impacto da disponibilidade de tecnologia móvel sobre o mercado bancário brasileiro a partir da regulação das fintechs

Abstract

The financial sector has been networked since the emergence of the internet and mobile technology has accelerated the implementation of new means of accessing products and services in the banking market and enabled the entry of new firms, fintechs, which operate only through virtual means. This thesis aimed to evaluate the impact of financial technology, through the availability of mobile internet technology on the traditional Brazilian banking market, from the introduction of regulation of fintechs as financial institutions in Brazil. To do so, we used as a proxy for the entry of financial technology the availability of mobile Internet in the localities, information about the 4th generation (4G) networks per municipality, present in the database of the telecommunication consulting company Teleco, and used data concerning four banking products of the traditional market: credit per capita, financing per capita, real estate financing per capita and savings per capita, with monthly data made available by the Monthly Banking Statistics per Municipality, of the Central Bank of Brazil. The database used contemplated 3,160 Brazilian municipalities, for the period from July 2017 to December 2019. The empirical analysis methods used were two-way fixed effects with leads and lags and two-stage differences-in-differences, through the methodologies proposed, respectively, by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2020) and by Gardner (2021). The study showed that the entry of financial technology through 4G mobile coverage impacted the levels of per capita credit volume, per capita financing volume, per capita real estate financing volume, and per capita savings volume of traditional banks. Thus, despite the theoretical ambiguity on the impact of the entry of fintechs in the banking market, it can be inferred that their presence in the Brazilian market had different impacts on the banking products tested. In the financing segment, the results showed that the entry of 4G mobile technology in municipalities caused a reduction in the volume of financing per capita granted by traditional banks; in the savings segment, in turn, the results showed an increase in the volume of savings per capita in traditional banks; in the financing segments, the results showed an increase in the volume of housing credit granted by traditional banks; and in the real estate credit the results showed neither statistically significant nor convergence between the different empirical strategies applied, although all results obtained indicate that the entry of mobile technology impacted the traditional banking market.