Causal and nonlinear effects of digital financial inclusion on bank stability: Evidence from emerging and advanced economies

The rise of robo-advisor wealth management services, which constitute a key element of fintech revolution, unveils the question whether they can dominate human-based advice, namely how to address the client’s behavioral biases in an automated way. One approach to it would be the application of machine learning tools during client profiling. However, trained neural network is often considered as a black box, which may raise concerns from the customers and regulators in terms of model validity, transparency, and related risks. In order to address these issues and shed more light on how neurons work, especially to figure out how they perform computation at intermediate layers, this paper visualizes and estimates the neurons’ sensitivity to different input parameters. Before it, the comprehensive review of the most popular optimization algorithms is presented and based on them respective data set is generated to train convolutional neural network. It was found that selected hidden units to some extent are not only specializing in the reaction to such features as, for example, risk, return or risk-aversion level but also they are learning more complex concepts like Sharpe ratio. These findings should help to understand robo-advisor mechanics deeper, which finally will provide more room to improve and significantly innovate the automated wealth management process and make it more transparent.

The article examines the influence of the current stage of economy digitalization on the financial inclusion in Ukraine. The purpose is to assess the level of financial inclusion in the country, to determine the dominant influence of price and non-price barriers to access to financial services for the Ukrainian population when compared to other world countries and to define which part of the adult population is able to join the formal financial services system through the use of innovative channels and financial service systems. Based on the methodological approaches proposed by the World Bank and the G20 Financial Inclusion Indicators, the authors analyze the real traditional and digital access opportunities of the general public to financial services in Ukraine compared to other countries across the world. Particular emphasis is placed on overcoming existing non-price barriers that impede formal financial inclusion of the Ukrainian population. The research findings stress the need to adhere to the basic principles of digital financial inclusion in order to regulate activities of financial institutions and their agents in the digital provision of financial services, strengthen regulatory control over the use of innovative financial products and service systems, and protect the rights of consumers of financial services in Ukraine.

This study came to inspect the impact of the development of both financial market and banking system on the economic growth of Jordan based on the annual data covering the period 1993–2017. Through the use of many methodologies: Johansen cointegration test, (VECM), and Granger causality test, where real GDP was used as an indicator of economic growth, the real market value of stocks (Market Capitalization) (LCAP) and Share Turnover (LTURN) are indicators for the financial market, Money supply in the broad concept (LM2), and Local domestic credit (LCR) are indicators for the banking sector.
The results of this study reported that the study variables are stationary, and in the level of order 2, they are integrated, and a long-run relationship between the study variables existed according to the Johansen co-integration test. VECM model result and the target model result confirm a short-run causality running from the all variables toward GDP. Granger causality test underline a single directional causality running from variables of our study to GDP and denote the short-run impact between LCAP, LTURN, LM2, LCR, and LGDP. The analysis of the variance decomposition shows that the development of the banking system affects economic growth almost equally with the impact of the development of the financial market. The results go to the same line of supply-leading hypothesis.