Banking on Nonbanks

We study how banking groups adjust corporate credit supply in response to tighter macroprudential policies. Using granular data on syndicated corporate loans, we show that banking groups reallocate lending from bank subsidiaries toward affiliated nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) following regulatory tightening. Relative to bank subsidiaries within the same group, NBFI subsidiaries expand lending, and their credit supply also increases in absolute terms. We estimate that by ‘banking on’ their nonbanks, banking groups offset, on average, more than half of the contraction in bank lending induced by macroprudential tightening. Our findings highlight an important intra-group reallocation channel through which banking groups can partially offset regulatory constraints and result in greater bank–nonbank interconnectedness.