Kei Tomimura

What Kinds of Credit Associations Favor Introducing New Financial Technology

Since 2003, the Financial Services Agency has set relationship banking enhancement program as an important strategic task to improve the functions of regional financial institutions. In this enhancement program, the FSA recommended that regional financial institutions introduce new financial products such as collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) and collateralized bond obligations (CBOs). However, this was left up to each institution’s discretion rather than being mandatory. This resulted in a large difference in the introduction of new products. Therefore, this paper has analyzed what kinds of credit associations favorably increased the use of new financial products. As a result, it has been confirmed that the larger their lending shares and management scale, and the better their business conditions are, the more positively they work on the introduction of new products. Considering the fact that relationships between financial institutions and enterprises tend to be fixed in Japan, this means that medium and small enterprises will have restrictions on the financial products they can use depending on the situation of their main banks.

Roles of Outside Directors in Cooperative Financial Institutions

As the governance of financial institutions is becoming an important issue, there are many papers empirically investigating the governance issues of banks, which are stock companies. However, cooperative structured financial institutions (co-ops), which have a unique governance structure different from stock companies, play a substantial role in the Japanese banking markets, and, therefore, it is worth examining whether some governance scheme developed for stock companies are effective at cooperative financial institutions. Our results showed that the presence of outside directors at co-ops (“Shinkin Banks”) contributes to an improvement in efficiency.