Even in the face of consolidation, competition is fought on the battlefield of the local market, where most households obtain the majority of their banking services. And, it is noteworthy that our measures of local market competition have remained quite stable over the past fifteen years.
Deregulation and consolidation have also cultivated the expansion of the financial services marketplace, as evidenced by the proliferation of many nonbank entities that provide the credit and transaction services that were once mainly the province of depository institutions. The impact of technology on financial services markets As has every segment of our economy, the financial services sector has been dramatically transformed by technology.