> Financial companies and banks already trust each other They most definitely do not, 2008 took care of that. > It doesn't make sense for them to be held unde

> Financial companies and banks already trust each other They most definitely do not, 2008 took care of that. > It doesn't make sense for them to be held under public scrutiny That's a matter of debate. The banks are held to, more or less, realtime scrutiny by the regulators on behalf of the public. Actually making transactions truly public would have tricky client confidentiality issues. That's why the focus has been on settlement and clearing as that's potentially more tractable. > Therefore, blockchain is a solution without a problem for financial institutions Possibly. The idea of a single version of the truth is very appealing to banks as a huge amount of time and effort is expended on reconciling trades, settlements etc. Whether a global transaction ordering has a use is debatable. Things like proof of work even less so. Bear in mind, as others have said, you can take some of the features that have been applied to blockchains and use them separately. It's not a one size fits all. However, if you take away enough stuff then you often find that other technologies could be more appropriate. > Their needs are already well met and there's little incentive to change Not at all. No-one's really happy with the status quo. The regulators want to be sure that the banks are well risk managed. Even further, they want semi-continuous proof that it's so. The banks need to satisfy the regulators and still make money. The banks are a long way from that today. > why uproot everything for a buzzword They may well not but you underestimate the ability of senior folk in big organisations to get distracted by the shiny, shiny. Banks are no exception, they are just as susceptible to fads as anyone. On the positive side, they are surprisingly good at accepting experimental technology. They've been early adopters of relational DBs, XML, Java, Smalltalk, Haskell, OCaml, object DBs, FPGAs etc etc. Of course, they're also one of the biggest users of COBOL so it's swings and roundabouts.