You don't have to assume nefarious motives and evil bank lords (But have fun with that if you like. I'm sure some are bad, some are good, but let's be charitabl

You don't have to assume nefarious motives and evil bank lords (But have fun with that if you like. I'm sure some are bad, some are good, but let's be charitable and assume other folks are intelligent and well-meaning, at least for the duration of this comment). The reason is very simple: banks are established entities by the government. Banks have very complex, old, and unwieldy ways of doing business. There's a huge chunk of infrastructure feeding and maintaining the existing system: COBOL programs, call centers, technicians, offshore IT, and so forth. All of this was funded assuming that the current status quo would continue. Worse, nobody can really afford to replace all of that crap in-place. Some banks are lucky to get basic UI changes done to their website under any kind of cost control. Usually, when some new way of doing business comes along, the new guys start from scratch. All their stuff is new and cheap. Customers get more cool stuff for way less money. But that's not how it is with banks. New guys are not allowed. They own the game. So they're stuck, and we're stuck. Voters can get angrier and angrier and get more laws passed to "stick it to the bankers", but at the end of the day, unless you want to destroy your banking system? Customers have to eat any costs of change. Meanwhile all these neat startups around banking are paying out the ass and taking on huge risks just trying to tinker around the edges. This is what a non-competitive market looks like. If you think about it, what PayPal accomplished was nothing short of a miracle. Kudos to those guys.