Detecting Systemically Important Platforms in P2P Market of China

Fueled by advances in technology and shifts in generational values, the market of online peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms is growing prosperously in China. While the development of this rapidly-evolving industry has stimulated the financial market where traditional banks could not reach, collapses of well-known platforms due to malpractice, fraud or business failure are raising great concerns about systemic risk, as troubles of systemically important platforms may trigger wide range of failures because of the network of financial exposures among the industry. However, the network of Chinese P2P lending platforms remains unknown. To fill this vital gap, we performed the first complex network analysis of the Chinese P2P lending platforms using empirical platform-level data. The network analysis enables us to detect the systematically important platforms, through the static importance indicators as well as cascading scheme. A further grouping analysis presents the different characteristic of the platform with different importance levels, which in turn proves the network modeling is able to function effectively in detectina the systemic important platforms.