The analysis of today’s financial markets as basis for identifying and reacting to emerging trends has become a major challenge to both incumbent banks as well as regulators who aim to promote fair competition. Moreover, market analysis can only uncover threats and opportunities if financial markets are defined correctly, key themes or topics are detected, competitors and their strengths are identified, and the evolving competitive market structure is analyzed over time. The aim of this project is to propose a new approach that enables banks and regulators to conduct a comprehensive, inexpensive and frequent analysis of financial markets. Our new approach will uncover and define the boundaries of financial markets, find trending topics, identify competing firms, estimate their relative importance, and visualize competitive market structure. The basic idea is to describe financial markets with keywords (terms) that consumers search for in search engines such as Google. In addition, groups of keywords identified by topic models describe trending topics in the market from consumers’ perspective. Furthermore, organic search results for each keyword contain domains, here considered as firms or banks, which are considered as most relevant to consumers. We then estimate each firm’s importance with the digital attention a firm captures based on the set of keywords for which the firm is listed in the organic search results, its rank as well as each keyword’s associated search volume. Finally, joint appearance in organic search results indicates firms’ similarity, which reflects competition in most cases and thus serves as the basis for visualizing competitive market structure. We will demonstrate our new approach in an empirical study of the retail banking market using quarterly data for one year which enables us to observe the market evolution over time. This first finding highlights the caveat that banks are losing direct contact to consumers.
