[...]
Blockchain. Blockchain. Blockchain.
*Cringe*
Every time a bank or something else is talking about the blockchain, you can be sure they are working on bitcoin and use the blockchain as a coverop. If they would really be interested in blockchains they would have said so 7 years ago. There is absolutely nothing new about blockchains 7 years later. the blockchain has not changed in any way, and anything financial should have know about it and looked into it about 6 years ago.
What
is new is that bitcoin has grown up. If they are interested
NOW, you can be sure that they are interested in bitcoin itself, as a currency. They may experiment with there own blockchains and there own alt-coins, saying it will improve the services for there customers (like they ever cared about that), but in the end they will go to the coin where money is to be made.
I don't really disagree with you, overall; however, there is something quite delusional about this whole private "blockchain" competition practice, and there is some thinking in these financial institutions that they are going to be able to bring the "good," if there is such a thing in their thinking with bitcoin, to their technological innovations without bring the "decentralized" "public" "bad" parts of bitcoin..
but in essence, these blockchain without the currency advocates seem to be missing almost the whole point of bitcoin.
So, in some sense, it seems that they don't quite get the "value" of bitcoin, and accordingly, I doubt that they are actually covertly investing in bitcoin (except maybe a few more enlightened individuals who actually get bitcoin are actually investing in it on a personal level). If we had so much secrete investing in bitcoin from rich individuals or institutions, we would already have BTC prices in the $2k territory.
In my thinking, i's going to take some time before some of these more traditional financial institutions figure out ways to build on top of bitcoin (or build systems that will work on top of bitcoin to take advantage of the low cost part of bitcoin) in order to create more competitive products, rather than seeming to want to compete against bitcoin.... Interesting times ahead, certainly.