监管不确定性与金融科技创新

April 2024 Abstract Regulatory uncertainty is prominent in FinTech. Regulators lack experience in assessing theprivate and societal value of FinTech innovation, with instruments at their disposal beingcrude and underdeveloped. We advance a theory where FinTech innovators, incumbent firms,and regulators strategically respond to opportunities to innovate under uncertainty. In it, reg-ulators acquire costly information about the value of innovation while FinTechs face regula-tory uncertainty. We characterize how the rate of innovation in FinTech depends on the bud-get and skills of the regulator in assessing the gains and risks to innovation, the private rentsthat accrue to innovators, and the number of FinTechs with access to new technology. Mul-tiple equilibria arise from the complementarity between regulatory preparedness/competenceand investments into innovation, adding extrinsic risks to the regulation–innovation game.Among several policy implications, our theory shows that ample regulatory budgets promptFinTechs to innovate more. Keywords:Extrinsic Risk, Financial Innovation, Imperfect Information, Regulation.JEL Classification:G28·C72·L51·O31 1Introduction The regulatory framework governing financial activities has relied on rules enforced by an au-thoritative body upon providers and users of services. That traditional framework has been chal-lenged by developments in the digital domain.In it, payments generate data with unspecifiedownership that can substitute collateral in lending decisions; financial assets can be traded by au-tonomous protocols at a high frequency across international borders; contracts and markets canbe maintained by an open pool of pseudonymous agents rather than a unique, identifiable legalentity. TheFinTechecosystem is complex. It consists of the simultaneous integration of forcesthat rarely emerge together: (1) breakthrough technologies, (2) new assets, markets, and services,and (3) new ways of designing financial infrastructure and executing contracts. There is need to rethink the regulatory architecture of financial services in light of FinTech.To date, relatively few directions have been offered.They often appear arbitrary and at oddswith each other. Regulatory actions have generally taken the form of crude interventions, ratherthan fine-tuned measures. Critically, they have left open for speculation what makes certain Fin-Tech activities acceptable in the eye of regulators.1 In other heavily regulated industries, suchas pharmaceuticals, applicable criteria to be met are well defined and compliance is verifiable.In banking, the industry has been directly involved in setting regulatory standards (“regulatorycapture”).In those industries, regulatory stringency — rather than uncertainty — is the mostprominent concern. Uncertainty about the regulatory perimeter and enforcement allows for theimplementation of only a limited subset of new technologies at the frontier in FinTech — it hasbeen argued that innovation has been stifled as a result. This paper presents a framework to study the impact of regulatory uncertainty on FinTechinnovation. Our framework is malleable and has a number of features that speak to this emergingindustry. In it, FinTech firms and regulators strategically respond to opportunities to innovate. Inthe regulation game that ensues, FinTechs do not know how regulators will respond to the emer-gence of a new technology. This uncertainty arises because not every profitable application of anew digital technology is known at the time of its development. Ex post, some of the applicationsturn out to be socially less valuable than others, even hazardous. Take distributed ledgers, in par-ticular blockchains, as an example. It has been the technological core of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They are a central feature of the crypto hype that unfolded over the last few years buthas led to crashes (e.g., trading platforms such as FTX and stablecoin Terra) and even facilitateda short-lived banking crisis (Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital). On the flip side, blockchainis also the key technology behind smart contracts, which have the potential to improve economicrelations (e.g., financial inclusion, trade, and credit) in countries with less developed institutions. For regulators, information acquisition about the potential social value of new technologies iscostly and imperfect. Depending on their structure, ability to learn, and even their budgets, reg-ulators may ban new technologies with some probability even if they are valuable (both privatelyand socially) or let new technologies play out even if they are socially costly. Notably, unlike inbanking, the potential market failures that may arise from FinTech innovation have not yet beenidentified nor are they well understood. In addition, other concerns enter the regulators’ valua-tion of innovation in the FinTech domain: it may make it harder for regulators to ensure finan-cial stability, market integrity