Essays in Empirical Finance

Abstract

We study several research questions regarding mobile banking on a customer as well as on a banks management perspective. By this, we document that customers to retrieve information about their financial situation more often after adopting mobile banking. In addition, we document that the higher transparency about the financial situation is associated with improved financial decision-making of mobile banking users. Concretely, we find mobile banking adopters to suffer less from high-interest overdraft debt. Additionally, mobile banking adopters reduce overdraft interest and fees by reducing consumption spending, increase credit card utilization and transfer liquidity from savings accounts in times of overdraft. Finally, we show that those mobile-banking adopters, who formerly did not use the online banking service of the bank, benefit from mobile banking adoption the strongest. With respect to the research aspects on a banks management perspective, we examine drivers of mobile banking adoption as well as resulting changes in client’s banking behavior. We find that customer’s financial demands and digital skills correlate positively whereas age is associated negatively to mobile banking adoption. We document a strong increase in online banking transactions after mobile banking adoption, while ATM, call center and branch transactions get substituted. Furthermore, mobile banking adopters perform more digital money transfers and cashless payments while they reduce offline money transfers and cash payments. Finally, adopters acquire more products and active mobile banking users increase their loyalty with the bank distinctly.