The Role of Fintech in Loan Origination: Evidence from China

Abstract

Using loan-level data on a large Fintech firm in China, we investigate whether unstructured data regarding consumers’digital mobile footprint and other soft information such as abundance of loan description, the type of mobile operating system, number of calls, SMSs and contacts proxy for social media connections, numbers of Sales apps, Financial Apps and Travel apps proxy for individual behavior etc., can complement rather than substitute for traditional hard information.