Digitalization and data, institutional quality and culture as drivers of technology-based credit providers

We investigate the development of technology-driven alternative credit markets using data from 94 countries for the period 2013–2019. We find that digitalization, institutional quality, and culture play significant roles in the national development of fintech and big tech credit. Moreover, we present the differences between the two types of alternative technology-based lending and consumer bank loans in this area. We show that different sets of factors encourage the development of either fintech, big tech, bank consumer loans, or all of them. Furthermore, we find that various national cultural profiles can boost the development of fintech credit services as well as bank consumer loans, while non-monetary factors play a greater role in fintech credit development paths than in bank loans across multiple countries. We posit that the sociocultural features of different markets determine the conditions of competition between banks and technology-based alternative lending providers in the digital era, and that they are one of the key drivers of final market success in different countries.