This legislative trend culminated in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which consolidated and extended the administrative changes that had allowed more extensive affiliations of commercial banks with investment banks, broker-dealers, merchant banks, and other financial firms. By the turn of the century, then, the Depression-era cluster of restrictions on commercial banks had been substantially loosened.
Banks could operate nationally, had few practical restrictions on their ability to pay competitive deposit rates, could conduct a much broader range of activities within their own operations, and could affiliate with virtually any kind of financial firm. Meanwhile, of course, financial engineering had been rapidly changing the character of the financial services sector as a whole.