The United States is awash with banks.

It's got almost 5000 commercial lenders, and yet amazingly, 5% of households have no bank account.

That's about five times the rate in France, Germany and Britain.

And if you look closer, it gets even worse because one in seven black households is unbanked versus one in 40 white households.

This is mattering more than ever because President Joe Biden wants to make more direct payments to Americans on the families to help them replace income lost but also to close America's yawning historical wealth gaps.

A family with no bank account that received a stimulus check in 2020 could have paid around $200 to cash it, according to a study by the Financial Health Network.

Banks say they're opening branches in low income areas, but that's only a part of the solution.

One third of the people who don't have an account say that it's partly because they don't trust banks, according to government surveys.

One way around that is for big banks to lend to smaller local ones that a better earning communities trust banks like Hope Credit Union in Mississippi, which is one that had funding recently, and lending support from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and even Netflix.

There's also more dramatic solution, which is to give everyone a free bank account, maybe at the Federal Reserve or even the Postal Service.

That's an idea that Biden's advisers have already been kicking around.

Banks may not like that kind of extra competition, but then, that's all the more reason for them to hurry up close the banking gap themselves.