O National Bank of Angola (BNA), held last week, the Conference on "Virtual Assets", through the Zoom platform, meetings that are part of the Annual Cycle of Conferences, started in 2018.
The opening speech came from Pedro Castro e Silva, Executive Director of the BNA, where he said that what has been observed in the last 15 years is a change in the structure of the financial system, worldwide. This change translates, on the one hand, into the entry of new intermediary institutions for currency issued by central banks.
For Castro e Silva, there are entities whose matrix is technology and/or telecommunications that have become part of the financial system, as is the case of the largest telecommunications companies in several emerging countries that are the most important providers of the Mobile Money service. In addition to these, continued the Administrator, we have fintechs that, increasingly, have been participating in the intermediation of central bank money, through various services such as open banking, open finance, credit risk analysis, microfinance, etc.
Still in his speech, in addition to the entry of new intermediary institutions of currency issued by central banks, which is a phenomenon that is changing the national and international financial system, in a structural way, namely decentralized finance.
In this potentially irreversible reality, financial transactions do not take place using the exchange of reserve positions at the central bank, but based on smart contracts based on a technology that we all know today, the blockchain. Add another fact. The instrument of exchange is not centrally issued and regulated currency by central banks, but others such as stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. There are more than 4.000 cryptocurrencies with a market value that has already reached the equivalent of two billion US dollars.
It should be noted that the webinar was divided into two panels, where current topics were addressed such as, the virtual assets– associated services and technologies and regulation of virtual assets- achievements and challenges, with presentations made by representatives of the Blockchain Academy, Binance, Plataforma Tech 21 Africa, FIU and the Banks of China and Portugal.
The conference on virtual assets also made it possible to analyze solutions adopted by countries and international organizations of reference, in order to serve as a subsidy for the definition of a path to be followed by the regulators of the Angolan financial system.
The said event was attended by members of the BNA Board of Directors, representatives of the Financial System Supervisory Board (CSSF), national and international specialists, academics, businessmen and representatives of public and private financial institutions.
