02353cas a2200253 a 4500 AALejournalIMF016036 230101c9999 xx r poo 0 0eng d 5.00 USD 9781513519258 1018-5941 BD-DhAAL BD-DhAAL Pierri, Nicola. Tech in Fin before FinTech : Blessing or Curse for Financial Stability? / Nicola Pierri, Yannick Timmer. Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2020. 1 online resource (43 pages) IMF Working Papers <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students Motivated by the world-wide surge of FinTech lending, we analyze the implications of lenders' information technology adoption for financial stability. We estimate bank-level intensity of IT adoption before the global financial crisis using a novel dataset that provides information on hardware used in US commercial bank branches after mapping them to their parent bank. We find that higher intensity of IT-adoption led to significantly lower non-performing loans when the crisis hit: banks with a one standard deviation higher IT-adoption experienced 10% lower non-performing loans. High-IT-adoption banks were not less exposed to the crisis through their geographical footprint, business model, funding sources, or other observable characteristics. Loan-level analysis indicates that high-IT-adoption banks originated mortgages with better performance and did not offload low-quality loans. We apply a simple text-analysis algorithm to the biographies of top executives and find that banks led by more 'tech-oriented' managers adopted IT more intensively and experienced lower non-performing loans during the crisis. Our results suggest that technology adoption in lending can enhance financial stability through the production of more resilient loans. Mode of access: Internet Timmer, Yannick. IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2020/014 Full text available on IMF http://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2020/014/001.2020.issue-014-en.xml IMF e-Library