KOC - KOL P2P lending in Vietnamese customers
Description
Digital consumer credit in emerging markets increasingly reaches households through social media influencers and referral schemes, raising concerns about over-indebtedness at a time when regulators are only beginning to supervise platform lending. Yet studies of peer-to-peer (P2P) borrowing still treat social influence as a single force, leaving unclear which sources move borrowers and through which psychological route. This study aims to examine how the expertise and trustworthiness of key opinion leaders (KOLs), the authenticity of key opinion consumers (KOCs) and the credibility of referrals shape platform trust, attitude and borrowing intention, and whether digital financial literacy limits these effects. The study applies PLS-SEM to survey data from 350 Vietnamese borrowers and prospective borrowers collected during the regulatory sandbox period. Both KOL facets raised trust, attitude and intention with statistically comparable weight. KOC authenticity acted mainly through attitude and directly on intention, with at most a weak effect on trust, whereas referral credibility influenced intention only through trust and attitude. The model explained 49.2 per cent of the variance in intention and showed high out-of-sample predictive power. Digital financial literacy improved attitude but moderated none of the eight source effects. The findings indicate that borrower literacy alone cannot safeguard against promotion-driven borrowing and support disclosure rules for sponsored and incentivised lending promotion in emerging credit markets.
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Institutions
- Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh CityHo Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh City