Bitcoin Events Pty Ltd is going to hold its second conference, “The Blockchain & Bitcoin Africa Conference 2016”, in Johannesburg on the 3rd and 4th March 2016. The conference aims to investigate the upcoming challenges and opportunities provided by bitcoin and the blockchain technology as well as their impact on the current social, economic and political order.

The conference has secured headline sponsorship from South African banking giant Absa, a member of Barclays, Memeburn reported.

“We see huge potential for financial institutions in Africa to embrace disruptive technologies like blockchain, and use them to empower individuals and improve the lives of their customers,” says Ashley Veasey, CIO for the Barclays Africa Group Limited. “We are already working to build capacity, expertise and solutions in this field, for example, through our Rise innovation programme, which sponsored the blockchain Supply Chain Challenge in Africa last year.”

Veasey further said that Barclays Africa, a subsidiary of UK-based Barclays Plc, is the first bank in Africa to become a member of the R3 blockchain consortium adding that such efforts will be valuable platforms for sharing some of the insights and projects in this space.

The speakers at the conference include Vinny Lingham, co-founder and CEO of the blockchain startup Civic; William Frentzen, Federal Prosecutor at the United State’s Attorney’s Office; Marcus Swanepoel, co-founder and CEO of BitX; and Verengai Mabika, the lead business developer at BitFinance.

Barclays’ Blockchain Effort In Africa

Barclays has been interested in the blockchain technology for quite some time and is working with several blockchain startups worldwide. However, it sees special application in Africa, Quartz Africa reported.

“Blockchain could be the most significant social and political innovation to impact Africa in 100 years,” says Barclays’ Head of Open Innovation Arian Lewis. “If digital currencies become adopted in African nations, it could significantly reduce corruption from government, it could provide transparency and control to every day citizens.”

Barclays has also collaborated with Consent, a startup that went through the bank’s pilot accelerator in Cape Town in late 2015. Consent originally used blockchain to improve reliability with individual medical records across different databases, however, co-founder Shaun Conway saw how Barclays could use this system to help comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations in the short term, and safeguard customer identities in the long term.

“Barclays is trying to define what they become in the future,” says Conway.

After the accelerator, the startup won a year-long contract to build a proof of concept for the bank worth over half a million dollars.