The Basel standards have become somewhat less simple over the years and are again under review. But achieving international agreement on both components of capital and a risk-based approach to capital adequacy was a major achievement. A second force for change was the growing integration of banking markets, both geographically and functionally.
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.