[noneeeed]

There's a classic Planet Money episode all about how behind the US is with inter-bank transfers. The huge number of often small banks in the US did seem to be a very significant part of the problem. Here in the UK we have many fewer banks, which makes it possible to build out the infrastructure that allows almost instantaneous transactions (rarely more than 15 seconds). As far as I'm aware support for the Faster Payments system is universal. I think that would have been much harder if there had been a large number of small banks without the technical capability to roll out such a system.