So bank margins double, while Americans continue paying high margin bank rates for car loans, mortgages and credit cards.
Technology also promises fundamentally to alter the economics of low-margin banking staples such as processing payments.
In the past few years, Wall Street houses saw that the best use of their analysts was to help generate high-margin banking business.
Analysts say the regulations could put an end to the double-digit profit margins banks enjoyed before the financial crisis.
Rising personal incomes have increased demand for the banks' long-term savings products, credit cards and car loans, offsetting the declining margins banks now earn on corporate lending.
With interest rates as low as they are now, the profit margins banks earn on their loans are significantly higher, so that on an operating basis they're likely to make money this year.
UBS, an investment bank, calculates that even if a tenth of bank deposits flee to online products (a heroic assumption), it might cut the net interest margin at banks by just 0.1%.
Palmer's margin over Banks was 233 points.
"We saw in the Golden Age of the mid-2000s a lot of firms coming to the region pushing high-margin investment banking," said Mathieu Vasseux, a partner in Dubai for the financial consultants Oliver Wyman.
The restless Italian Secret sauce Reprints Related items The world economy: Dangerous frothNov 12th 2009It may be that, at the margin, central banks would like to increase the proportion of their reserves that are held in the form of bullion.
This has whittled down the margin between banks' deposit and home-loan rates, so lowering the cost of mortgages.Buyers have also been encouraged by the Bank of England's quarter-point cut in the base rate to 4.5% last August.
