The Digitalization’s effect in different business model on the Italian Banks

This article analyses the effects of digitalization on the Italian banks also considering business models. The dataset is composed by commercial, cooperative and saving banks for the period running from 2011 to 2016. The goals are to study the impacts that the use of the internet banking and the business model have had on the reduction of the branches. The methodology used is those of the instrumental variables. The results show that business models have an opposite influence on the bank’s branches. While “commercial banks” have a negative relationship, the “cooperative banks” have a positive connection, so they have shown that they are able to bring banking and financial services to places whose small size or the insufficient presence of production units did not justify the cost of a branch for the other banks. Instead, the use of internet banking is always statistically significant with a positive relationship with the number of branches. This means that consumers are using the internet banking only to conduct daily operations and they go in branches for all operations as investments or trading.