综合中介与金融科技的市场力量

Stanford University University of Geneva, Swiss Finance Institute, and CEPR Boston College Integrated Intermediation andFintech Market Power∗Greg BuchakN Vera ChauAdam JørringAugust 25, 2023AbstractWe document that in the US residential mortgage market, the share ofintegratedintermediaries acting as both originator and servicer has declined dramatically.Exploiting a regulatory change, we show that borrowers with integrated servicers aremore likely to refinance, and conditional on refinance, are more likely to be recapturedby their own servicer. Recaptured borrowers pay lower fees relative to other refinancers.This trend is partially offset by a rise in integratedfintechoriginator-servicers, whorecapture at higher frequency but at worse terms. We build and calibrate a dynamicstructural model to interpret these facts and quantify their impact on equilibriumoutcomes. Our model suggests that integreated intermediaries enjoy a marginal costadvantage when refinancing recaptured borrowers, and fully disintegrating them wouldreduce refinancing frequencies and increase fees. Fintechs use technology to reacquirecustomers and reduce borrower inertia against refinancing. This endogenously createsmarket power, which fintechs exploit through higher fees. Despite worse terms ex-post,fintechs increase consumer welfare ex-ante by increasing refinancing frequencies. Takentogether, our results highlight the importance of intermediaries’ scope in consumerfinancial outcomes and highlight a novel, quantitatively important application offintech: customer acquisition.Keywords:Mortgage market structure, mortgage refinance, fintech, intermediation.JEL Classification Codes:G2, L5∗We thank Peter DeMarzo, Darrell Duffie, Steve Grenadier, Josh Rauh, Amit Seru, Jeff Zwiebel, and other seminar partic-ipants at Stanford for comments and suggestions. We also thank Yoonjoo Hwang for oustanding research assistance. Buchak isat Stanford Graduate School of Business. Email: buchak@stanford.edu. Chau is at Swiss Finance Institute & Geneva FinanceResearch Institute. Email: vera.chau@unige.ch. Jørring is at Boston College. Email: adam.jorring@bc.edu1Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4552425 A loan origination creates two conceptually distinct assets: the right to the cashflowspaid by the borrower—the loan—and the right and obligation to collect payments from theborrower and forward them to the loan’s owner in exchange for a fee—the servicing right. In atraditional balance sheet model of banking, origination, servicing, and receiving cashflows areintegratedwithin one financial intermediary. However, the modern industrial organizationof financial intermediation has seen a striking trend of separating loan origination from loanownership, e.g., in the context of residential mortgage origination (Buchak et al., 2023) orsmall business lending (Gopal and Schnabl, 2020). This paper documents and explores theconsequences of an additional margin of dis-integration: the increased separation of loanoriginator and loan servicer.We study this phenomenon in he context of the US residential mortgage market. As inother contexts, the mortgage servicer occupies an important role in the mortgage interme-diation chain. In particular, the servicer maintains a long-term, ongoing relationship withthe borrower: The servicer collects monthly payments and forwards them to the mortgageowner. The servicer reminds the borrower when there are late payments. The servicer ispotentially responsible for ex-post modifications in the event of delinquency or default. Inshort, unlike the originator or mortgage owner, the servicer plays an active role in the fi-nancial life of the mortgage borrower far after the point of origination. For this reason, it isnatural to expect that characteristics of the servicer will have an impact on the borrower’sex-post financial decisions, such as refinancing or default. This paper focuses on the therefinancing impliactions of mortgage servicers.Our paper uncovers two key economic forces that distinguish combined originator-servicers—which we termintegratedintermediaries—and integrated fintechs from other, dis-integrated financial intermediaries. First, we show that integrated intermediaries possess acost advantage in refinancing their existing servicing customers. In particular, by virtue oftheir long-term relationship with the borrower, the servicer already possesses documents,credit information, and access that are key in the origination of a new loan. Second, we findthat integrated “fintech”1intermediaries appear to be able to use data and customer accessfor the purposes of more effective customer acquisition in a manner that non-fintech lenderslack the technical expertise to implement. In particular, fintech lenders are able to refinancetheir “woodhead” servicing customers who would no