Ripple (not really but in name) financiers have done well in collecting talented developers, keeping them well fed and locked up and preventing them from doing anything useful for humanity. "Here's a big screen. Make some silly icons or something. We need a new deck for our next round." Y'all got fiatted. You want to be remembered for cutting costs on interbank accounting of counterfeitables? Or are you going to get out there and do something interesting?
Banks will not run on public ledgers. They want their transactions private for obvious reasons. Yes, Ripple has helped networks of banks connect through distributed ledgers on private networks (obviously no game changer). But Ripple, with the use of XRP wants to connect these large networks of banks with small banks that would normally not have the ability to easily make cross-boarder transactions. If this isn't useful for humanity then I don't know what is.
Ending reliance on counterfeitable zero-energy-of-issuance non-verifiable tokens and the incredible waste and irresponsibility that comes with it, for one.
Some interesting quotes from Microsoft
"Given this multi-chain vision, we see smart contracts as a key piece. Then you need ILP, which is the glue in the system that holds everything together, so that different chains can interoperate. That means a derivatives chain can interact with the securities chain its derived from. In all of these interactions, youll have to move money around. So you will need Ripple for that.
We see Ripple and ILP becoming part of the fabric of this multi-chain reality. Then you have Azure, which is the horizontal computing layer. Well provide scale management. Well make sure theres regulatory compliance for data residency. Weve got all that stuff covered." Marley Gray, who leads Microsoft Azures Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) initiative
Theres a lot that bitcoin or Ripple and variants can do to make moving money between countries easier and getting fees down pretty dramatically. But bitcoin wont be the dominant system. Bill Gates
There are many competing atomic cross chain protocols. And of course there are ordinary trusted third parties which do the job of inter-chain movement quite handily. All well and good. The problem with these kinds of quotes is that they are designed not for users of financial systems, and not for technical developers. They seek the ear of issuers or investors and so are slightly deceptive in their intent.