Track: Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

Digital payment has become one of the most popular payment methods all around the world, especially in countries that witnessed the rapid development of internet. As a traditional financial institution, commercial banks have been impacted by newly developed payment technology since third payment platforms have attracted customers to use the digital payment for daily consumption, transferring, and even investment. This paper focuses on analyzing whether and how the commercial banks in China have been affected by digital payment by using empirical methods. Systematic Generalized Method of Moments (SYS-GMM) is used to test the relationship between the productivity of commercial banks and digital payment. Panel Vector Auto-Regression (Panel VAR) is then applied to evaluate the long-term impact of the growth in digital payment on the efficiency of commercial banks, which is calculated by the Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI). The result based on data from 81 banks in China between 2013-2019 suggests that bank-involved digital payment is beneficial to both profitability and productivity of commercial banks, and third-party digital payment harms the profitability but is not a granger cause of productivity.