No bank would use such a volatile currency for payments, for obvious reasons. If someone ends up using a technology based on the Ripple codebase, that's another story, but it is more like company X hiring the people behind Ripple for a consulting gig, then company X betting their fortunes on XRP.

IOTA also claimed to have a partnership Microsoft, when in fact it turned out they used Azure for hosting. The lack of any journalistic standards in cryptocurrencies is a huge issue.

Ignoring BoE, Ripple's customers that are using XRP in production are:

Moneygram, Cuallix, Mercury FX, and IDT.

There are also 100 customers using xCurrent (the pre-XRP product that's used to transfer fiat). Upgrading to xRapid would increase the speed and decrease the costs of such transfer, so I imagine there will a conversion of some of those 100 customers to using xRapid, and thus, XRP.

Ripple is just a old fashion money-wiring business, but uses the XRP as internal booking Symbol.

You are completely wrong. Ripple is decentralized by way of validation of transactions done through their distributed consensus protocol, which is done through validator nodes sitting across the world at places like MIT and Microsoft.