Expanding into financial services: financial risk in Chinese non-financial platform firms with heterogeneous data resources

With the development of the platform economy, an increasing number of non-financial platform firms have embedded financial services into their core business operations. However, systematic micro-level evidence on how this transformation affects firms’ financial stability remains limited. Exploiting non-financial platform firms’ acquisition of financial licences as a quasi-natural experiment, this study employs a staggered difference-in-differences design to examine the impact of the expansion into financial service on financial risk, and further explores heterogeneity along the dimensions of data scale and data breadth. We find that expanding into financial services generally reduces financial risk for non-financial platform firms, but this effect critically depends on platforms’ data resources: only firms with higher data scale or data breadth exhibit a significant risk-mitigating effect. This study provides new micro-level evidence on the risk effects of the expansion into financial services by non-financial platform firms and enriches the literature on platform finance by highlighting the role of data resource structure.