In Sweden bank provide two forms of services. All digital services which is what they are strongly pushing for, and ATM machines where customers withdraws (with a max of $1500 per week) and store owners can deposits in a few special machines in the "large" cities. Practically no office deal with cash and the few remaining is purely for consultations.
Through all this digitization and cost savings the numbers of banks has gone down. From a infrastructure perspective it has never been as cheap and easy to start up a bank, and yet what we see is the opposite. Now why do we not see new competition in banking?
Probably because the massive amount of regulations that have been added in the last century means starting with nothing is a massive undertaking if you aim at providing a full service bank. Startups are popping up, but usually they only do one thing. And a limited set of that one service at that.
Through all this digitization and cost savings the numbers of banks has gone down. From a infrastructure perspective it has never been as cheap and easy to start up a bank, and yet what we see is the opposite. Now why do we not see new competition in banking?