[ABCLAW]

The number of banks is not a good indicator of how much competition exists in a market. The elasticity of prices in that market is a better measure, but also has flaws. In general you need to look at how much margin a given industry is pulling in to determine how much leverage it has.

On the bank metric: There are plenty of quasi non functional FDIC insured banks that are used as vehicles for reverse takeovers to allow a market entrant to avoid the hassle of obtaining their licenses.

Additionally given the substantially increased variability within different European markets we'd expect significantly different competitive dimensions between regional and international tier banks.