The number of banking institutions in the U.S. has dwindled to its lowest level since at least the Great Depression, as a sluggish economy, stubbornly low interest rates and heightened regulation take their toll on the sector.
The number of federally insured institutions nationwide shrank to 6,891 in the third quarter after this summer falling below 7,000 for the first time since federal regulators began keeping track in 1934, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The decline in bank numbers, from a peak of more than 18,000, has come almost entirely in the form of exits by banks with less than $100 million in assets, with the bulk occurring between 1984 and 2011. More than 10,000 banks left the industry during that period as a result of mergers, consolidations or failures, FDIC data show. About 17% of the banks collapsed.
The consolidation could help alleviate concerns that the abundance of U.S. banks leads to difficulties in oversight or a less-efficient financial system. Meanwhile, overall bank deposits and assets have grown, despite the drop in institutions.
“Seven thousand is still an awful lot of banks,” particularly in an era where brick-and-mortar branches are becoming less profitable, said David Kemper, chief executive of Commerce Bancshares Inc., a regional bank based in Missouri. “There’s no reason why we need that many banks, especially if those smaller banks have a much lower return on capital. The small banks’ bread and butter is just not there anymore.”
Still, the falloff is raising alarms among boosters of community banks, who say such lenders—which represent the vast majority of U.S. banks—are critical to the economy because they are more likely to make small-business loans. The number of physical bank branches in the U.S. is also shrinking. From the end of 2009 through June 30 of this year, the total number of branches dropped 3.2%, according to FDIC data.
“All too often, the large banks use their models and their algorithms, and if you don’t fit in their boxes, you don’t get the loan,” said Sheila Bair, the former FDIC chairman who is now a policy adviser at the Pew Charitable Trusts think tank.
Unlike before the financial crisis, new startup banks aren’t rushing to take the place of exiting institutions. Every year from 1934 to 2009, investors in the U.S. chartered at least a few and sometimes hundreds of new banks, according to the FDIC data. The Bank of Bird-in-Hand opened in Bird-in-Hand, Pa., on Monday—it was the first new bank startup in the U.S. since December 2010.
The reticence stems from slim profits and rising regulatory costs as Washington tries to ensure banks won’t fail en masse as they did during and after the 2008 financial crisis, bankers and industry consultants say.
SNL Financial, a firm that tracks bank data, said the median loan-growth rate for banks with less than $100 million in assets was about 2% during the year ending Sept. 30, well behind the roughly 3.4%-to-7% rate for midsize banks, or those with assets as high as $10 billion.
FDIC researchers, in a study of community banks released in December 2012, found that, as net interest margins—the difference between the interest charged on loans and that paid on deposits—declined across the industry in recent years as interest rates dropped….”
