A friend just bought Ripple on Bitstamp and it's taking upwards of two weeks to verify an account? I can physically walk to a bank and get foreign currency in p

A friend just bought Ripple on Bitstamp and it's taking upwards of two weeks to verify an account? I can physically walk to a bank and get foreign currency in person 1000x faster than this. I think all of this is speculation and hype, and only a small percent of people now have a use case met by these products.