South Africa’ Standard bank will launch permissioned Blockchain

According to the report, South Africa’s Standard Bank is going to launch permissioned blockchain. It will be intended for overseas exchange trades for corporate clients. The new platform will be activated in the second half of the year. It is based on Hyperledger Fabric, which is a foundation for developing solutions for the enterprise with a modular architecture. According to the report, the bank also plans to connect its own foreign currency trading app to the new blockchain platform.

The benefits of the new blockchain platform

As Standard Bank’s head of foreign exchange, Richard de Roos says, the new blockchain solution is expected to reduce the incidence of trade failure. At the same time, it should improve the visibility of liquidity and increase regulatory transparency. There are more expectations about the new blockchain-driven system, it should make the processing of international trades quicker and speed up foreign exchange payments and settlements. Moreover, with the new system, all the parties will have access to all the documents which will be available in real time and it should also increase the transparency of transactions. The Standard Bank of South Africa will not be the only financial institution that will be using the new solution, Stanbic, its partner in Uganda, will also be using the new Bachchan platform alongside third parties, that will be directly involved in the trades. In addition to that, the bank also works with the Industrial and Commercial Bank (ICBC) of China. It is expected that the blockchain will be further extended with the help of this partnership. According to the report, Richard de Roos has confirmed the ongoing negotiations of the bank and its 20 franchises with ICBC. In case the negotiations will be closed in favour of the Standard Bank, it will extend the hub into Asia.

South Africa takes some big steps

The development of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry is going rapidly. The crypto community of the country is growing daily and more and more people start using cryptocurrency payments on a daily basis. Earlier this year, the financial regulatory organizations in South Africa created a working group that releases a consultation paper that focuses on cryptocurrencies. With that, the government has called for public input and opinion to develop a new cryptocurrency regulation policy. The new Tax Amendment Act was issued, that was focusing on defining cryptocurrencies as financial instruments. Just recently, South African cryptocurrency exchange VALR received investments from Bittrex and launched the new cryptocurrency exchange platform. Moreover, it is expected that soon the platform will offer fiat-to-crypto exchange too, and will expand in 20 other African countries. As it seems 2019 will be all about cryptocurrencies and blockchain development for South Africa. With government readiness, the business adopting crypto and blockchain technology and the growing number of SA crypto community we will be expecting some of the great news.