Name: BitPesa CEO Comments on Crypto Crackdowns in India and Pakistan
Uploaded: 2018-04-13
Duration: 2 min 53 s
Description: 'Sometimes the central banks make a quick move or place blame where it shouldn’t be.”

[ SOUND ] Recently India and Pakistan their central bank said that they were going to force banks to no longer work with companies that are working on cryptocurrency or have relationships with cryptocurrency companies. And we have seen other crack downs. What is your sense about what is happening around the world? Is this Also happening in Africa, we're seeing the same kinds of things .>> Yeah, so I mean unfortunately in an early sector and in an early frontier and I know a lot of people in the sector say this, we're at the very early stages. So there has to be a lot of education And not like a pedantic whether they must be educated to our values. But it's also just like a lot of understanding. What are the risks? How do they relate to this economy? How do we mitigate those risks? And unfortunately when there's other economic factors happening, sometimes the Central banks make a quick move or place blame where it shouldn't be. But the positive news is we've seen a couple of this crack downs reversed. We have definitely seen that happen in Japan after Bangkok still like, What gonna happen? And then last year they came up with some beautiful regulation about that topic >> And they are at the forefront in that regulation >> Exactly, exactly and they didn't have to do that and in Kenya ourselves our home country where we started, where I lived for seven years And we saw the Central Bank of Kenya do the same thing and say wait a second we're not sure what's happening. This company's getting pretty big. It's getting a lot of attention. We haven't had time to really assess this. So all banks stopped working with companies like this. And then just a month ago we saw the creation of a block chain task force and the government get very vocal about really wanting to reopen this. So it took two years but it happened. And the best news also is that in the South Africa the South African Reserve Bank came up with a very detailed piece in March about the risks that this technology could pose, the ways to mitigate the risk, and the overall conclusion that there was no systemic risk on the country. From cryptocurrency itself- Exacty. so this is nothing that's going to crash the economy, create a globa crises. Exactly, and there are things to watch out for, but they're nothing that you can't kind of meet with, compliance or normal AML / KYC. For me it's always, do we throw all of the knowledge we have about compliance and finance out the window because we have a new technology. No. We use what we've learnt in best practice and we adopt that to new technologies as they arrive. So the very vocal stance from the South African Reserve Bank was very encouraging and I think I would hope everyone to see that India and Pakistan follow suit. You know, they are mum for quite a while [ UNKNOWN ] in South Africe and out over few years ago, Valinanum. Avsivik was teasing me saying, they are never gonna say yes and I was like, they will. Have faith. And we had a bet over it. So here we are in- You won a bet. Well, Yet to be settled. But I mean it's 2018 before that happened. So I think we just need to be patient. [ MUSIC ]

"Sometimes the central banks make a quick move or place blame where it shouldn’t be.”

BitPesa CEO Comments on Crypto Crackdowns in India and Pakistan

Finance

Crypto still scrutinized by central banks and regulators. 