For example, the share of domestic banking assets held by the top five banking organizations went from 18 percent in 1994 to almost 32 percent in 2002, and the share of the top twenty-five went from 46 percent to 61 percent. However, these numbers tend to hide more than they reveal about the competitiveness of the U.S. banking structure.
For example, at the end of 2002 there were still almost 6,500 commercial banking organizations in the United States, not to mention almost 1,400 savings institutions and almost 10,000 credit unions. Moreover, between 1994 and 2002 more than 1,300 new banks were opened in the United States, sometimes in direct response to perceived declines in service resulting from a bank merger.