Do those banks use AWS now? Did they fight it with many justifications of why bare metal is better and cheaper and more efficient before finally realising it's holding them back? Because that's what happened in every company I worked in and that same thing is going to happen to every company working in finance.
In a capitalistic world efficiency comes before pride or your shareholders replace you.
The only problem with this analogy is that “cloud” was able to quickly produce numerous examples of material cost savings. You’re right insomuch as the banks were all over it as soon as the business case was proven. But there’s nothing comparable in the crypto space.
Who is using crypto to deliver mainstream financial products (banking, insurance, credit cards, loans, mortgages) at lower cost?
AWS came out in 2007 and most companies barely started exploring it until at least 5 years later. All of the same arguments I heard about AWS back then I hear about Ethereum right now (it's more expensive, bare metal is more flexible, we have to recode things in the AWS way) but people have selective memories and think things that are obvious now were always obvious.
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.
It’s really non-obvious to me that there is any advantage of crypto that makes its use inevitable in financial products. Those Australian banks - are they crypto-related products in the sense that they appeal to crypto people (maybe a way to buy or trade crypto?), or are they actually more efficient versions of mainstream products? The idea that banks will inevitably adopt crypto because their crypto-using competitors will be more cost-efficient seems implausible to me. I just don’t see the mechanism for crypto being a cheaper way of doing things.
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.