Inevitably, since there could be spillovers from failures, and since banks and others would accept funds from the general public, there would end up being a degree of regulation. And so the history of banking and finance is not just a history of financial innovation, it is also a history of regulatory response. That regulatory response has had its own quite pronounced cycles.
The Genoa conference of April 1922 laid the foundations for an important innovation: the creation of the gold exchange standard, under which gold was flanked by convertible currencies and central banks were granted greater autonomy; this was to be used to stabilize the value of gold, through international cooperation.