The exception is retail brokerage, where e-commerce has been a huge success with a majority of trading now being on the Net in most markets. Also, because the industry has been so successful over the past ten years or so, there is a reluctance to change. They've already been making good money providing traditional services within a traditional business structure, so there's a natural reluctance to fix something that's not broken. Institutions won't have the luxury of sitting back and waiting to see how this scenario will play out. Finally, there's a big potential problem of regulation.
Regulation is a major issue.
The financial industry has been carefully protected by a lot of sovereign governments as a fundamental part of the economy, so they're not going to suddenly just open the doors to a completely deregulated financial system under the MetaCapitalism scenario. The problem is that existing regulations were written for another era. But in the financial services industry, there are major national reasons why governments may want to interfere. They've regulated their financial services industries for decades. Naturally, they're more concerned about the stability of their own financial industries than they are about creating worldwide access, which could greatly impact employment in their financial services sectors.