There is a practical benefit of locality in traditional distributed systems that may get lost with companies centralizing their operations for economies of scal

There is a practical benefit of locality in traditional distributed systems that may get lost with companies centralizing their operations for economies of scale. If your bank is local, as is your merchant's, you could design the payment network in such a way that, if your region is cut off from the rest of the Internet, local communication can still allow payment authorizations to go through.