The Digitalisation of Banking and Social Media: Implications for Deposit Pricing

Michael Brei, Giulio Cornelli, Leonardo Gambacorta and Boris Hofmann

No 21609, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper examines the implications of two coincident digital trends — the digitalisation of banking and the widespread adoption of social media — for the pricing of deposits in the United States. Using branch-level data, we analyse how both trends interact to influence the level of deposit rates as well as their adjustment to changes in the policy rate. Our analysis distinguishes between traditional banks with physical branch networks and digital banks. Using panel regression analysis and local projections, we find that digital banks’ deposit rates are higher and more reactive to changes in policy rates, consistent with the view that their customers are more price sensitive. We further find that digital banks offer higher deposit rates and react more sharply to policy rate changes in counties with higher social media activity, as measured by Twitter usage, supporting the notion that high social media use further increases price sensitivity.

Keywords: Deposit rate pass-through; Digital banking; Monetary policy transmission; Social media; Branch-level data; Policy rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 E52 G21 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21609 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21609

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21609

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().