This paper firstly investigates the impact of digitalisation on bank efficiency and then analyses potential non-linearities in this relationship, as well as the possible moderating role played by bank business models, covering a sample of European banks over the period 2006–2021. Our results suggest that IT investments improve bank efficiency - more on the profit side than on the cost side – but that this interplay has an inverted U-shape, which indicates that excessive investment in IT technologies may be detrimental to both profit and cost efficiency. Moreover, the empirical findings show that the digitalisation-efficiency linkage is sensitive to the business model adopted by banks; in particular, retail-oriented banks benefit more from digitalisation compared to those that are market-oriented. The overall results, including those countries where digitalisation is overall low, are consistent across different robustness tests and model specifications. This study could be helpful in guiding a cognisant digital transition for European banks.

中文翻译：

---

数字化与银行效率：来自欧洲分析的证据


本文首先调查了数字化对银行效率的影响，然后分析了这种关系中潜在的非线性，以及银行商业模式可能发挥的调节作用，涵盖了 2006 年至 2021 年期间欧洲银行的样本。我们的结果表明，IT 投资可以提高银行效率——更多地是在利润方面而不是在成本方面——但这种相互作用呈倒 U 形，这表明对 IT 技术的过度投资可能对利润和成本效率造成不利影响。此外，实证研究结果表明，数字化与效率的联系对银行采用的商业模式很敏感;特别是，与市场导向型银行相比，零售型银行从数字化中受益更多。总体结果，包括那些总体数字化程度较低的国家，在不同的稳健性测试和模型规范中是一致的。这项研究可能有助于指导欧洲银行的认知数字化转型。