Ripple wants to suppress the price
Ripple currently does influence the price. Every month XRP is released from escrow and some of it is sold on the markets. Without a doubt Ripple's long term goal is to make the price go up, while short (and long) term broad distribution of XRP is key.
While the cost savings associated with using XRP for volatility are higher for banks during periods of lower XRP price volatility, they are still very significant even during periods of high volatility. Ripple's goal is to increase the price of XRP through utility of the digital asset. This means advancing use cases that include usage of XRP for liquidity.
Logically speaking, if your XRP is not valuable enough to fund transactions on exchanges reliably because the liquidity is low, then xRapid use case for XRP falls apart and will be taken over by the asset with better settlement time and liquidity: BTC or ETH. So trying to reduce XRP price is basically tying to kill the Ripple use case, because the bridge asset use case is lost to ETH or BTC (due to having better liquidity) and Nostro / Vostro use case lost due to high volatility.
For those that still doubt, consider these facts:
Currently, there is very little volatility risk for those institutions that choose to use XRP for liquidity; xRapid is currently configured to dynamically source liquidity by not requiring organizations to hold onto XRP. Source
For those banks and financial institutions that eventually choose to replace their Nostro account holdings with XRP, however, Ripple is in the midst of creating custody solutions with their business partners. In addition, banks and other financial institutions can hedge their positinos using traditional futures markets such as CME Group and Cryptofacilities.