South African Reserve Bank (SARB) establishes Financial Technology Fintech Program

On February 13^th, the Central Bank of South Africa (SARB) announced a Fintech program with three main objectives.

The first objective is to review their position on private crypto currencies and to inform an appropriate policy framework and regulatory regime.

The second objective is to investigate the applicability of innovation facilitators for SARB in the form of regulatory sandboxes and accelerators. 

The third objective is to launch an Ethereum based DLT platform in collaboration with the banking industry with Consensys, an expert on Quorom, who will assist SARB in the design setup of infrastructure and running of the Proof of Concept for payments using a tokenized asset on DLT to transfer value. The report on the findings of the POC will be published in Q2.

From the press release announcement, it seems that South Africa Central Bank is now on the path to include not only crypto-currencies but also Blockchain solutions into the banking system in the country.