Google Trends, bank popularity and depositors' fears in Indonesia

Purpose

This paper investigated whether a bank’s popularity and depositors' fear of Google search volume could affect bank deposits and credit.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors used two different quarterly data from Google Trends and banking data from 2012 Q1 to 2020 Q1. Based on available data, Google Trends data start from 2012. The authors exclude data after 2020 Q1 because the Covid-19 pandemic arguably increased the volume of Internet users due to shifting behavior to online activities. They merged and cleaned the data by winsorizing at 5 and 95 percentiles to avoid any outlier problems, reaching 74 banks in the sample. They used panel data estimation of quarterly data following Levy-Yeyati et al. (2010) and Trinugroho et al. (2020).

Findings

The results show that a higher search volume of a bank’s name leads to higher deposits. A higher search volume of depositor fear reduces deposits and credit. The authors also found that banks with high risk and a high search volume of their name have a significantly lower volume of deposits.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, not many papers in banking and finance have used Google Trends data to gauge related issues regarding depositors' behavior. The authors have filled a gap in the literature by investigating whether the popularity of Google search and depositors' fear could impact deposits and credit. This study also attempted to establish whether Google Trends data could be a reliable source of information to predict depositors' behavior by using a Zscore to measure bank risk.