NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- On Tuesday, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act will be five years old and, like many five-year-olds, it hasn't yet accomplished much in life. 

Has Dodd-Frank done what it set out to do? Has Dodd-Frank made the banking system safer? Will Dodd-Frank save the banking system from another crisis like the one experienced in 2007 and 2008?

The answer to the third question is "probably not." Financial legislation always attempts to fight the last war. It is constructed so as to prevent the things that just happened from happening again.

Guess what: The financial system and the operations of commercial banks have changed over the past five years. In fact, they had changed substantially by the time the Dodd-Frank bill had been crafted and signed by President Obama. The next financial crisis will spring from the new financial system, not the one that existed in 2007.

One of the major changes that the legislation attempted to address was the problem of "too big to fail" banks. That is, there was great concern that the largest banks in the country had gotten too big, their risks could not be managed, and they were too dominant in the whole financial system.

According to Federal Reserve data, in June 2007, before the financial crisis hit, the biggest 25 banks in the U.S. banking system controlled just over 53% of the total assets of the system. At the end of June this year, the biggest 25 banks in the banking system controlled well over 56% of the total assets.

Perhaps the most substantial change over this period was the growth of foreign-related financial institutions. In June 2007, foreign-related banks, all of them large institutions, controlled just under 12% of total banking assets in the U.S. In June 2015, these foreign-related institutions controlled over 15%.

In all, the 25 biggest domestically chartered banks in the U.S. along with the foreign-related institutions went from controlling a little over two-thirds of the banking assets as the earlier date, now are closing in on controlling almost three-fourths of the assets.

These data are reinforced by FDIC data on the number of banks in the banking system. On June 30, 2007 there were 7,351 commercial banks in the U.S. banking system. By March 31, 2015, the latest information available, there were closer to 5,500, nearly 1,800 fewer.

Within this decline, the number of commercial banks with less than $100 million in assets fell by 1,591: banks of asset size between $100 million and $1.0 billion declined by 260.

In just looking at the data alone, it seems as if the "big bank" situation has grown over this time period, not declined.

And this problem isn't getting better. Since the end of the Great Recession, the banking system has lost more than 200 banks every year with the exception of the period between June 30, 2011 and June 30, 2012, when the banking system lost only 191 banks. In the nine months ending March 31, 2015, the U.S. banking system lost another 248 banks.

The vast majority of this decline has not been in outright bank failures. Most banks that are no longer around have been acquired by other banks.

This continued drop in the number of commercial banks makes one wonder, is the banking system safer? If the banking system were in really good shape, there would not be so many banks leaving the system every year. It seems as if bank regulators are managing the reduction in the number of banks in a way that does not disrupt the banking system as a whole.

Here the Federal Reserve has a role to play. Over the past six years the Federal Reserve has conducted three rounds of quantitative easing. The primary argument for the quantitative easing is that the Fed wants to see the economy growing faster.

There is another reason for such injecting so many reserves into the banking system. The Fed is assisting the FDIC in keeping banks operational so that the reduction in the number of banks in the system can proceed in an orderly fashion.

In order to assist the FDIC and err on the side of monetary ease, the Fed has a balance sheet that is around $4.5 trillion in assets sized and has pumped about $2.5 trillion in "excess reserves" into the banking system. This is a huge program. For comparison, at the end of June 2007, before the financial turmoil began, the balance sheet of the Fed accounted for $0.9 trillion is assets, or only $901 billion, and "excess reserves" totaled $0.010 trillion, or about $10 billion.

The last thing the Fed has wanted in this recovery is a replay of the 1937 situation where the Fed moved too fast to soak up "excess reserves" and consequently started off another round of bank failures.

The current banking data seem to point to the fact that Dodd-Frank has not cleared up the problems it attempted to address. In fact, one could argue that in many areas, the situation is still somewhat fragile.

Take a look at what the financial press has had to say. Here is a very negative opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal followed by an interview with both of the creators of the legislation. In addition, the Financial Times talked with former congressman Barney Frank about the legislation.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.