Physical Frictions and Digital Banking Adoption

The authors thank David Sraer (the editor), an anonymous associate editor, three anonymous referees, seminar participants at Singapore Management University (SMU), and conference participants at the second Toronto FinTech Conference, the 2019 Hong Kong University FinTech Conference, the second Sun Yat-Sen University Finance International Conference, the 2019 China International Conference in Finance, the 2019 Central Bank Research Association Annual Meeting at Columbia University, and the 2020 Conference on Asia-Pacific Financial Markets for their helpful comments and suggestions. The authors also thank Sumit Agarwal, Brad Barber, Gennaro Bernile, Francesco D’Acunto, Darrell Duffie, Phil Dybvig, Murray Frank, Antonio Gargano, Jianfeng Hu, Dirk Jenter, Chang-Mo Kang, Roni Michaely, Jong-Min Oh, Clemens Otto, Wenlan Qian, Changcheng Song, Johan Sulaeman, Melvyn Teo, Chishen Wei, and Bernie Yeung for their comments. The authors are grateful to DBS Bank for providing data and Piyush Gupta (group chief executive officer) and Royce Teo (group head, data management) for their comments. This paper is part of work done in the Financial Inclusion research area at SMU’s Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics (SKBI), where Hyun-Soo is a visiting faculty member. The authors also thank SKBI for financial support. This paper was previously titled “The geography of FinTech.” The online appendix for this paper can be downloaded from www.mysmu.edu/faculty/rogerloh/.