Chain, yes, distributed, no
I quite like the idea of using a blockchain to sign steps in a transaction but the distributed stuff is just a solution looking for a problem. You just need a trusted third party that holds the ledger / provides the service, like a clearing centre but one that is banned from conducting transactions on its own behalf. Where this is being done correctly we're seeing more competition for things like handling of payments. But this is about as newsworthy as introducing a new hashing algorithm.