Through the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the various states were liberalizing or eliminating their restrictions on interstate bank ownership. At the same time, nonbanks aggressively developed and offered products that could compete directly with banking products. The Reigle-Neal Act of 1994 was the epilogue to the saga of interstate banking, eliminating the remaining barriers to interstate ownership and interstate branching.
As a result, in an era of consolidation and innovation, banks could pursue merger partners and branching strategies on the basis of economics rather than geography while also consolidating and rationalizing their own legal structure. The boundaries between banking products and other financial service offerings have also become less clear.