The most likely end game for Ethereum is being a replacement for all backend financial systems. Instead of having to hire teams of people to verify things or integrate various legacy systems together, everyone can build on one neutral platform and pay a little ETH as the fee for using it.
The industry has investigated blockchains for many years, since distributed consensus for transactions is a problem they actually have. They might run their own private chains. But it won't be ETH.
Conceptually, a service provider utilizing Ethereum could create or aggregate on-chain services and package them in a similar format to what a bank is today with very little overhead.
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/anz-the-fir...
Like Aztec Protocol, which is used by zk.money.
It’s also the same technology used by Tornado Cash, which was sanctioned recently.
And they pride themselves on differentiating themselves in the market by offering specialised products and services.
Not sure why a bank would deliberately want to turn themselves into the equivalent of a reseller.
In a capitalistic world efficiency comes before pride or your shareholders replace you.
Who is using crypto to deliver mainstream financial products (banking, insurance, credit cards, loans, mortgages) at lower cost?
Most banks in Australia are working on crypto related products, Visa is too. Eventually once a few have a network together, especially internationally, the snowball accelerates because of Metcalfs law and soon it's more costly to not integrate.
The way I think of it is "if we had everything running on crypto rails, would companies want to switch back to what they have now" and the answer is obviously no, so it's just a matter of time until it happens.
In this case, the crypto-not-currency community really needs to work on branding.