数字信贷的兴起与监管：印尼的经验教训

The Rise and Regulation of Digital Credit Lessons from Indonesia Salman AlibhaiEmily BrezaMartin KanzFrancesco Strobbe Policy Research Working Paper11300 Abstract This paper examines the rise of fintech lending in Indone-sia, using a dataset of more than 139,000 individual creditrecords representative of the full spectrum of consumer loansin the country. The analysis reveals that fintech lending hasbecome deeply embedded in Indonesia’s financial landscape,with more than 40 percent of borrowers holding at least onefintech loan at the end of the sample period. While digi-tal lenders have expanded financial inclusion by reaching more affordable conventional credit. However, this expan-sion of access brings new challenges: default rates amongborrowers who obtain their first loan from a digital lenderare 5 to 7 percentage points higher than among borrowerswho start with non-fintech loans, and elevated default riskspersist even after borrowers graduate to lower-interest rateconventional credit. The paper concludes by assessing the The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those TheRiseandRegulationofDigitalCredit: 1Motivation Like other emerging markets, Indonesia has made remarkable strides in advancing financial inclu-sion, fueled by a wave of innovation in retail financial products targeted at low-income householdsand small businesses. An especially important catalyst has been the rapid rise of digital credit, whichhas accelerated sharply since around 2020 and opened new opportunities for borrowers long under-served by traditional financial institutions. However, this trend has also presented new challengesfor regulators and the financial sector.It remains unclear, for example, whether the expansion of In this paper, we examine the impact of digital credit on financial inclusion in Indonesia. To do so,we draw on a unique individual-level panel dataset from an Indonesian private credit bureau, whichis representative of the population of consumer loan borrowers in the country. This dataset, whichhas not previously been available to researchers, allows us to track individual credit histories overtime and answer a set of questions that are important to understanding the role of fintech lending in Our analysis of credit market trends in Indonesia proceeds in three steps. We begin by assem-bling a novel dataset using loan-level credit bureau data, tracing the credit histories of more than100,000 individual borrowers over time. Using this dataset, we first document general trends in theIndonesian consumer credit market, including borrower demographics, the evolution of loan sizes In the second part of the analysis, we take a closer look at the contribution of fintech lendingto financial inclusion and the evolution of credit risk among fintech borrowers over time. We showthat—contrary to widespread concerns that fintech borrowers may remain trapped in small, high-interest, loans—there is substantial evidence of borrower graduation from digital credit to lower- point into the formal financial system and needs to be augmented by a digitization of the conventionalbanking system to support financial inclusion at scale. We also show that the expansion of fintechlending in Indonesia has led to the financial inclusion of borrowers whose credit risk profile differsmarkedly from that of borrowers who start out with a conventional loan. Specifically, we find that the Finally, we examine the effect of recent fintech regulation aimed at supporting financial inclusionand bringing credit reporting standards for digital credit in line with those for conventional loans.We first examine the impact of Indonesia’s interest rate caps for fintech loans, which were intendedto support financial inclusion but had the unintended effect of reducing access to credit for unbankedhouseholds. Because the interest rate regulation limited lenders’ ability to price the credit risk, fintechlenders reallocated new lending to less risky and more profitable existing borrowers, resulting in asharp contraction of fintech lending to new borrowers. While this has unambiguously reduced theability of fintech lending to advance financial inclusion, a reduction in unsecured fintech lending tonew borrowers in metropolitan areas may have been prudent from a risk-management perspective, This paper contributes to a growing literature on digital credit and financial inclusion. Studiesin this literature have examined how fintech lending can overcome traditional barriers to financialinclusion by leveraging alternative data, digital platforms, and non-traditional distribution cha