한일 대부업 시장의 금리결정 메커니즘에 대한 이론적 고찰

The purpose of this paper is to provide policy implication to Korean Consumer Finance industry by analysing the cause of different behaviors in interest rate determination between Korea and Japan according to the existence of credit information infrastructure. Historically, Korean Consumer Finance market is not a natively grown market. This market was formed by new entrants of Japanese money lending business after the financial crisis in 1997. Their entrance have a positive role to relieve the financial exclusion of a certain areas of Korean financial consumers. The origin of Japanese Consumer Finance started from Tan chi (團地) loan before and after the 1960s. In the 1970s as the white-collar financial loan (Sara Kin) became more popular, their business management system changed from small-sized delivery system into large store formation. The market experienced rapid growth. However, as new types of various competitors entered into the market as well as a lots of lenders, screening function did not work properly and consequently, market profitability started to deteriorate. After a long time of interphase, taking the opportunity of 1990s asset bubble collapse, Japanese Money lending business recovers their business by means of speedy (fast screening), convenience (as the non-guaranteed and unsecured loans), and anonymity (automatic loan appraisal with no personnel). After the Korean financial crisis, Japanese money lender has become major players in Korean Consumer Finance market by taking advantage of an accumulated know-how in Japanese market. One of reason for the strengths of Japanese Consumer Finance industry is that they are wells-equipped with credit information infrastructure and thus has less information asymmetry in assessing borrower’s credit, which is not so in Korea. Korea still does have information asymmetry in a large scale as such credit information DB (Data Base) is not constructed yet. As a result, the lending rate is highly concentrated at a level right below interest ceiling without varying spectrum of interest rates, which is not the case in Japan. Using Hotelling framework and considering two different markets according to lender’s credit status, we find the following 3 implications. Firstly, if information infrastructure is adopted, the search cost of borrower could be reduced as well as the lender so that potential lender whose credit status is benign can seek other Consumer Finance institution more easily such as card loan company. Otherwise her switching decision into other competing financial institutions would be much more difficult. Secondly without the introduction of information infrastructure, if screening technique using a distribution information on borrowers’credit status could work,then interest rate discrimination among varying credit status borrowers would have been implementable. However, the structure of Korean Consumer Fiance market does not allow such screening scheme to work because it turns out that incentive compatibility constraint is neither held nor binding. The reason is as the followings. While Consumer Finance company can enjoy monopolist status for high-risk (low-creditworthiness) borrower group, for low-risk (high-creditworthiness) borrower group it faces a vivid competition from other consumer finance institution such as card loan or capital company. Thus, the remaining available choice for Consumer Fiance company is to set indiscriminating interest rate regardless of borrowers’ risk type. By the way, for low creditworthy borrowers, they could take the advantage of enjoying lower borrowing rate than they should do if perfect information or ex-ante costly screening were allowed. On the contrary,The Japanese industry, as their Consumer Finance company are equipped with consumer’s credit information, charges different borrowing rate according to borrowers’creditworthy. Thirdly our welfare analysis confirms that establishing the information infrastructure and thus resolving information asymmetry problem are pareto-improving measure to Consumer Finance companies as well as financial comsumers. In this line, we argue that supervision authority needs to mandatories the introduction of a consolidate consumers’credit information DB in Consumer Finance industry so that information asymmetry problem between Consumer Finance companies and their consumers be resolved. It also improves social welfare by allowing differentiated lending rate according to consumer credit.