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The Effect of Instant Payments on the Banking System: Liquidity Transformation and Risk-Taking

2025-04-25

Time: 9:00 am- 10:30 am, April 25th, 2025

Speaker: Yiming Ma (Columbia Business School)

Platform: Zoom

Meeting ID: 821 9499 0142

Passcode: 655507

 

 

Abstract:

Instant payment systems have received considerable attention because of their integration with the banking system and their shared functionalities with CBDCs. We show that instant payments may have the unintended consequences of increasing the banking sector's demand for liquidity and risk-taking incentives. Using administrative banking data and transaction level payment data from Brazil's Pix, one of the most widely adopted instant payment systems, we find that banks increased their liquid asset holdings and lent out more subprime and defaulting loans after the adoption of instant payments. We establish the causal relationship by constructing a novel instrument based on passive payment timeouts. These findings arise because the convenience of instant payments to consumers comes at the expense of banks' ability to delay and net payment flows. The inability to delay payments increases banks' demand for holding liquid assets over transforming illiquid ones. Banks' increased holding of liquid and safe assets in turn exacerbates their risk-taking incentives in choosing illiquid assets. Our findings bear important financial stability implications in light of the global surge in adopting instant payment systems, e.g., FedNow in the US.

 

 

Speaker:

 

 

Yiming Ma is an Associate Professor in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School. She studies the evolving landscape of financial intermediation, where non-banks like mutual funds and ETFs are increasingly engaged in liquidity transformation while the traditional banking sector is transforming less liquidity than before. Yiming analyzes the implications of this trend on asset prices, financial stability, and monetary policy transmission. Her findings have been mentioned in the popular press and cited by the International Monetary Fund, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the Financial Stability Board. Yiming is a member of the Finance Theory Group and an external consultant for the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She is also an associate editor at the Journal of Financial Economics. Yiming received a Ph.D. in Finance from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2018 and a B.A. in Economics & Mathematics and Global Affairs from Yale University in 2013.