A lot of the financial system is built on legacy systems that don't work very well, don't interoperate very well, and don't really have the capacity to handle w

A lot of the financial system is built on legacy systems that don't work very well, don't interoperate very well, and don't really have the capacity to handle what's demanded of them. Hence why a lot of very simple things takes days when they should take seconds, or cost several dollars when they should cost fractions of a penny: Stuff like transferring money between accounts, registering a change in ownership of financial assets, etc. Generally speaking the situation is something like "there's a central organisation that everyone trusts, they run a central ledger, but it's slow and limited; we need to upgrade it." However, spending millions and millions of dollars to make a better system for recording payments, or changes in land title, or whatever is a hard sell. It's an extremely boring problem that's been solved ages ago, and now someone needs to actually go and build it, but nobody wants to fund it, and nobody wants to work on it. A blockchain, on the other hand, is cool. People want to talk about them, people want to work on them, and you can get funding. Of course, it's totally unsuited to solving any problems banks actually face, but that's neither here nor there. :)