Prof. Rachel Nam

Rachel Nam is Assistant Professor of Finance at USI. She obtained her Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt, Graduate School of Economics, Finance, and Management (GSEFM). She has received several awards for her research including the WFA Brattle Group Ph.D. Award for Outstanding Research in 2024, and JFI/FIRS Ph.D. Student Paper Award in 2023.

Prof. Nam’s research interests lie primarily in FinTech, financial intermediation, household and consumer finance, and decentralized finance. Her research studies how technology changes the provision of financial services and its impacts on consumers and firms. 

Her most recent research examines the implications of open banking, customer-directed payment data disclosure on prospective borrowers in consumer credit.  She exploits a unique empirical setting in which users are given the option to share bank transaction details with the largest Fintech lender in Germany. She shows that observably riskier applicants yet with lower ex post defaults are much more likely to share, which is in line with theory on private information disclosure in markets with quality uncertainty. Such data sharing is associated with higher approvals and lower interest rates. These benefits are driven by improved credit quality inferences and reduced information asymmetry.

• Portfolio Management and Asset Classes
  • Personal Finance and Household Choices
• Financial Institutions
  • Banks
• Frontier Topics
  • Big Data and Fintech