African Entrepreneurs Have High Expectations from Blockchain Technology

“Data is currency. If you are not making all your decisions with data, it is too late for you.”

During the Thomson Reuters Africa Summit, entrepreneurs agreed that blockchain technology can change African business forever and allow more people to contribute towards the economy's development.

During the annual Thomson Reuters Africa Summit, members spoke favorably about blockchain technology, which, as most of the entrepreneurs expect, is going change the business ecosystem entirely.

Ran Neu-Ner, CEO of Creative Counsel, which provides media and marketing solutions, called businesses and individuals to adopt the emerging distributed ledger technology that guarantees safe Internet transactions.

“Blockchain is so much more transformative than even the Internet revolution because it allows you to transact. This is not something you can ignore. I don’t know of any industry that is not going to be affected by blockchain in any way or form.”

Sonya Kuhnel, CEO of Blockchain Academy, said that blockchain technology could integrate more than 3.5 billion people, the ones who don’t have access to retail banking solutions even today, into the economy. This may be a worldwide system that would allow people to make transfers at low fees and take part in the economic development. She said:

Kuhnel also touched upon areas of identity management and verification, and came with successful examples of companies that have developed applications to solve different identity-related problems. She said that the blockchain technology would make it easy for banks and financial institutions to verify the identity of clients.

Ran Neu-Ner is sure that the blockchain has stepped into a new era:

“This era could be the end of big business and the beginning of a decentralized world, where multiple contributors take part in a network. For the first time in history, we are dealing with this thing called disruption. Up until now, we’ve only had innovation.”

He added that businesses would have to focus more on data:

He said that giants like Walmart or Microsoft have struggled to adapt to the changes, while Nike got fully involved with data.

Nike CEO Mike Parker said that his company was a big data company that also sells sportswear.

Recently, wereportedthat the Central Bank of Nigeria was working to adopt blockchain technology as well and it seems like the region is aiming to benefit from the disruptive changes coming soon.