Cryptocurrency Research Conference 2022

Description

Abstract
The development of Fintech has allowed alternative finance models to drastically penetrate the banking sector and the financial intermediation space. The growth of alternative financing in the UK can be observed from two popular crowdfunding instruments - marketplace lending for consumer loans and crowdlending for business loans. In both cases, funds are supplied by ‘peers’ rather than traditional banks. The disparity between the market value of the loan-based crowdfunding sector and the monetary financial institutions (specifically commercial banks) has highlighted the potential impact of the emergence of loan-based crowdfunding on traditional bank lending. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to determine whether there is a marked increase in crowdfund and P2P-based borrowing as opposed to commercial bank lending during the pandemic. Our study also examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the market size of crowdfunding and P2P lending versus the market size of traditional lending by commercial banks. We apply a panel model with random effects to test our hypothesis. Our data covers the period from January 2009 to March 2022. The robustness was done using the Difference in Difference approach and the ANCOVA analysis. The panel includes a set of 17 UK loan-based crowdfunding such as Zopa and Funding Circle, collected individually from the platforms’ statistics and loan performance books, 19 UK-commercial banks derived from the Monetary Financial Institutions List from the Bank of England, Covid-19 data in the UK, and other macroeconomic variables such as employment rate, banks’ lending rate etc. were all collected from the Refinitiv DataStream. Our results show that although the Covid-19 period, as well as the lockdown negatively influences loan-based crowdfunding loans, there is no effect of commercial banks’ lending activities on crowdfunding loans.

Period	22 Sept 2022 → 23 Sept 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	Durham, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International