FinTech, SME efficiency and national culture : evidence from OECD countries

This paper aims to undertake a thematic review of academic papers on financial technology (FinTech) to identify three broad categories for the purpose of classifying extant literature. The paper summarizes the research and findings in this emerging field. Thereafter, it identifies the gaps and provides directions for further research. Simultaneously, the paper collates technical terms related to FinTech that appear repeatedly in each category and explains them. Finally, the study highlights the lessons that growing FinTech firms and their regulators can learn from the experiences of their counterparts across the globe.,A systematic review of literature consisting of 130 studies (social science research network [SSRN]-29 papers, Scopus-81, other sources-20) on FinTech is carried out in this thematic paper.,This thematic paper divides FinTech into three themes, i.e. financial industry, innovation/technology and law/regulation. The paper suggests that a thorough impact of FinTech on various stakeholders can be understood using three dimensions, namely, consumers, market players and regulatory front. It is noted that FinTech is in its nascent phase and is undergoing continuous development and implementation through product and process innovation, disruption and transformation.,The paper reports that FinTech promises huge potential for further study by various stakeholders in the FinTech industry – from academia to practitioners to regulators.,The paper summarizes lessons that could be of significance for FinTech users, producers, entrepreneurs, investors, policy designers and regulators.,The paper is believed to add value to the understanding of FinTech in light of the emerging threats and opportunities for its various stakeholders.

Financial technology: a review of extant literature

Property Rights and Social Justice analyses 'progressive property' in action by examining the role of constitutional property rights guarantees in mediating private ownership and social justice. It combines insights from property theory with enlightening doctrinal analysis of the interaction between property rights and social justice in the constitutional and broader legal context. It does so through the prism of the Irish Constitution's property guarantees, which uniquely in the English-speaking, common law world both protect property rights and requires their regulation by the State to secure social justice. Through this analysis, the book grounds key debates in contemporary property theory in fresh, illuminating doctrinal examples, and enhances global debates about the constitutional protection of property rights. It argues that primacy is perhaps inevitably afforded to political determinations about the appropriate mediation of property rights and social justice, meaning that the political impact of constitutionalisation needs to be disentangled from its strict legal effects.

Property Rights and Social Justice: Progressive Property in Action

New financial technologies (FinTech) have erupted around the world. Consequently, there has been a considerable increase in academic literature on FinTech over the last five years. Research tends to be scantily connected with no coherent research agenda. Signi - cant research gaps and important questions remain. There is much work to be done before this area becomes an established academic discipline. This paper offers coherent research themes formulated through focus group meetings with policymakers and academics, and also based on a critical assessment of the literature. We outline seven key research gaps with questions that could form the basis of academic study. If these are addressed it would help this area become an established academic discipline.

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Fintech and the Future of Financial Services: What are the Research Gaps?

Common law and civil law property appear to be quite different, with the former emphasizing pieces of ownership called estates and the latter focusing on holistic ownership. And yet the two systems are remarkably similar in their broad outlines, for functional reasons. This paper offers a transaction cost explanation for the practical similarity and the differing styles of delineating property and ownership in the two systems. As opposed to the “complete” property system that could obtain in the world of zero transaction costs, actual property systems employ structures characterized by shortcuts in order to achieve property’s substantive goals of protecting interests in use. Overlooking this structure leads to the bundle of rights picture of property, even though property is a structured bundle of relationships. The architecture of property consists in part of four basic relationships, and a number of characteristic features of property automatically arise out this architecture, including exclusion rights, in rem status, and running to successors. Where civil law and common law differ is in their style of delineation, which reflects the path dependence of initial investment in feudal fragmentation in the common law and Roman-inspired holistic dominion in civil law. This transaction cost explanation for the functional similarities but different delineation process in the two systems promises to put the comparative law of property on a sounder descriptive footing.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2226486_code951382.pdf?abstractid=2017816&mirid=1

An Economic Analysis of Civil versus Common Law Property

The digital economy is changing everything, including how we borrow money. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, banks pulled back in their lending and, as a result, many consumers and small businesses found themselves unable to access credit. A wave of online firms called fintech lenders have filled the space left vacant by traditional financial institutions. These platforms are fast making antiques out of many mainstream lending practices, such as long paper applications and face-to-face meetings. Instead, through underwriting by automation — utilizing big data (including social media data) and machine learning — loan processing that once took days for mainstream lenders can now be done in minutes by fintech firms. The result of these fintech advances has been quicker access to capital, more economic efficiencies, and even greater prospects for access to credit for the unbanked and underbanked. “Click here” is the new “sign on the dotted line.” 
But there is a lot still to learn about fintech lending. How do these firms work and what kinds of products do they offer? Moreover, what role will they play in the future of American debt markets, particularly when it comes to the role of machine learning in assessing a borrower’s creditworthiness? This Article explores these questions and assesses current government responses to the nascent industry. It also surveys the current consumer protection landscape for fintech lenders and analyzes a multi-year dataset of complaints submitted to the CFPB relative to products offered by these firms. The Article concludes by offering several policy recommendations for how to regulate this new world of bitcredit.

Consumer Bitcredit and Fintech Lending

In Foreclosed, Christopher K. Odinet gives voice to the stories of homeowners that have been neglected, particularly those facing foreclosure and deep financial distress. The book reveals the powerful and often invisible mortgage servicing industry, the tremendous discretionary power it wields over the housing lives of most Americans, and the servicing problems that still persist today. In doing so, it unveils a quiet and dangerous market shift in mortgage servicing - namely, an ongoing move toward a shadow banking sector where regulation is weak - that threatens the stability of our housing finance system. Ultimately, the book demonstrates how the law does not afford homeowners the protection most think and how regulation of these mortgage middlemen remains weak. Foreclosed should be read by anyone concerned with the state of housing and home ownership in the United States.

Foreclosed: Mortgage Servicing and the Hidden Architecture of Homeownership in America

In the past several years the growth of virtual property in today’s economy has been explosive. The everyday use of virtual assets ranging from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube and virtual world accounts is nearly absolute. Indeed, by one account Americans check social media over 17 times per day. Further, a growing number of savvy virtual entrepreneurs are reporting incomes in the six and seven figure range, derived solely from their online businesses. Nevertheless, although the commercial world has come to embrace these newfound markets, commercial law has done a poor job of keeping up. Scholars have argued that laws governing everything from taxation, to bankruptcy, to privacy rights have not kept pace with our ever-changing virtual world. And nowhere is this truer than in the law of secured credit. Doubtlessly virtual property has come to represent significant wealth and importance, yet its value as a source of leveraged capital remains, in large part, untapped. This unrealized potential is not without good reason; the law — specifically Article 9 of the UCC and the law of property more broadly — suffers from a number of deficiencies and anomalies that make the use of virtual property in secured credit transactions not only overly complex and expensive, but almost entirely untenable. This Article shines light on these shortcomings, and, in doing so, advances a number of guiding principles and specific legislative recommendations, all geared toward a reformation of the law of secured credit in virtual property.

/pdf/bitproperty-and-commercial-credit-jglbb6o7n0.pdf

BitProperty and Commercial Credit

The promise of financial technology (“fintech”) and artificial intelligence (“AI”) in broadening access to financial products and services continues to capture the imagination of policymakers, Wall Street, and the public. This has been particularly true in the realm of fintech credit where platform companies increasingly provide online loans to consumers, students, and small businesses by harnessing AI underwriting and alternative data. In 2019 alone fintech lenders represented nearly 50% of total non-credit card, unsecured consumer loan balances in the United States. One of the most prevalent ways fintech credit firms operate is by securitizing the online loans they help originate. In doing so, fintech lenders are able to access the capital markets and further the spread of borrowed capital and credit risk. Against this backdrop of increasing institutional investment in fintech securitized assets, this Article reveals how consumer finance law is playing a subtle but increasingly important role in commercial financial transactions. I do this by exploring how structured finance has come to operate in the fintech credit marketplace and by comparing it to pre-2008 securitization activity in the home mortgage context. In doing so, I critique algorithm-driven credit securitization and point out certain economic and legal risks that make it similar to pre-2008 mortgage securitization, as well as other risks that are unique to fintech finance. These pertain to, among other things, the opacity of loans underwritten through the use of alternative data and machine learning, the untested efficacy of such underwriting techniques, and the ways consumer finance laws—such as licensing, usury, and standards-based regulation—and the growth of nonbank finance companies intersect with the securitization process. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations for addressing these future risks.

Securitizing Digital Debts

Debt is property, and, because of this, property law has a lot to say about how debts are resolved Indeed, property law is deeply woven into the fabric of the bankruptcy process — a fact that has been woefully neglected by many scholars The ability to provide debtors with relief and the ability of creditors to demand protections from discharge or diminished payments are both concepts that are intimately tied to property law However, despite the doctrinal workings of property law in this context, from a theoretical standpoint property law has been underutilized This is particularly true, as this Article asserts, in the public insolvency context — when governments go broke Instead of being relegated to a mere mechanical (and normatively side-lined) status, I argue that property theory, particularly that arising out of the progressive property movement, has much to say about public debt crises and the resolution of the different interests at play between debtors and creditors In order to contextualize this argument, I use the Puerto Rican debt crisis as a lens through which to understand how progressive property theory should be used to reform the way property law has been interpreted in the context of public debt emergencies

Christopher K. Odinet

Papers

Consumer Bitcredit and Fintech Lending

Foreclosed: Mortgage Servicing and the Hidden Architecture of Homeownership in America

BitProperty and Commercial Credit

Securitizing Digital Debts

Of Progressive Property and Public Debt