银行和社交媒体的数字化：对存款定价的影响

byMichael Brei,Giulio Cornelli, Leonardo GambacortaandBoris Hofmann Monetary and Economic Department June 2026 JEL classification: E43, E52, G21, O33 Keywords: deposit rate pass-through, digital banking,monetarypolicy transmission,social media activity, BISWorking Papers are written by members of the Monetary and EconomicDepartment of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by othereconomists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org). ISSN 1020-0959 (print)ISSN 1682-7678 (online) The digitalisation of banking and social media: Implications Michael Brei, Giulio Cornelli, Leonardo Gambacorta and Boris Hofmann Abstract This paper examines the implications of two coincident digital trends— the digitalisation ofbanking and the widespread adoption of social media — for the pricing of deposits in theUnited States. Using branch-level data, we analyse how both trends interact to influence thelevel of deposit rates as well as their adjustment to changes in the policy rate. Our analysisdistinguishes between traditional banks with physical branch networks and digital banks. Using JEL codes:E43, E52, G21, O33 Keywords:Deposit rate pass-through, Digital banking, Monetary policy transmission, Socialmedia activity, Branch-level data, Policy rate 1. Introduction Over the past decade, two major digital trends have affected large parts of the population: thedigitalisation of banking services, including the ability to manage deposit accounts remotely;and the spreading of social media as digital communication platforms where users can easilyshare information and other content. The proliferation of remote banking services and Both developments have likely affected the elasticity of deposit supply and deposit pricing. Inparticular, deposit rates offered by digital banks, i.e., banks operating primarily through onlineplatforms, would be expected to be higher compared to traditional relationship banks with aphysical branch network and to be more sensitive to changes in market conditions. Traditionalbanks typically incur higher costs, provide more banking and personalised services, and enjoygreater market power in their local environment. To compete, digital banks may have to offer In this paper, we test these potential implications by comparing deposit pricing of digital banks,defined as centralised and virtually structured institutions, with that of traditional banks,defined as decentralised and physical branch-based institutions. First, we assess whether thereare systematic differences in the level of deposit rates offered by digital versus traditional banks Our study extends the previous literature on deposit pricing (Drechsler et al., 2017; d’Avernaset al., 2023; Yankov, 2023) and its relationship with digitalisation (Jiang et al., 2023; Koont, 2023;Rose, 2023). Our contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of bankingdigitalisation and social media use in affecting deposit margins and policy rate transmission todeposit rates. We merge several datasets: the FFIEC Call Reports on the financial statements ofbanks, the FDIC's Summary of Deposits (SoD), the S&P RateWatch database on branch-leveldeposit rates, and geotagged Twitter (now X) data from the Twitter Streaming Application an aggregated level to identify trends and stylized facts and concludes with a within-bankregressionapproach.The latter allows us to control for differences in banks’externalenvironment using bank-time fixed effects, with a view to disentangling the differential The main results of our analysis are as follows. First, digital banks tend to offer higher deposit rates than traditional, physical branch-basedbanks, particularly compared to larger banks. The differences in deposit rates are more Second, digital banks offer significantly higher savings and small time deposit rates in stateswith high social media activity. This finding supports the notion that digital banks face greater Third, digital banks exhibit a higher pass-through of policy rate changes to deposit rates thantraditional banks. The differential responses are more pronounced in the savings and smalltime deposit segments, and they vary over time. The higher responsiveness of deposit rates isconsistent with the view that digital banks counter deposit outflows from more reactive Fourth, high social media activity is associated with faster policy rate pass-through by digitalbanks. More specifically, when comparing branches of the same bank, digital banks’ branchesin counties with higher social media activity raise deposit rates more than their branches in The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a brief literature review.Section 3 describes the data. Section 4 outlines the strategy to identify digital banks by meansof a cluster analysis. In section 5, we analyse differences in the level of deposit rates offered byd