South Africa’s Standard Bank pilots integration with Bitcoin
Switchless co-founder Marcus Swanepoel announced at Finovate Europe 2014 that his firm’s product enables Standard Bank of South Africa account holders to trade with Bitcoins and store it in a secure wallet. It is being test run by an internal pilot group in South Africa’s Standard Bank, the largest in Africa, and there is a possibility to roll it out to the public, but nothing has been announced nor confirmed.
This is the first time that a major bank has trialled a Bitcoin integrated system. Switchless which is headquartered in Singapore said, “our proprietary modular enterprise software allows for partial or full integration into existing financial infrastructures, giving financial institutions maximum flexibility for the unique and complex requirements they face.”
Switchless software offers the following modules:
- Brokerage: Buy and sell Bitcoin using traditional fiat currency. According to Switchless, their broker system “searches for the best pricing globally and offers instant and reliable execution”
- Storage: Secure cold storage of Bitcoin
- Merchant: Merchant services that will allow customers to accept Bitcoin for goods and services “at competitive rates”
- Controller: “Manages the account level end-user environment. It controls interactions with existing banking infrastructure such as online banking and KYC verification, the Broker, Vault and any other Switchless or external modules”
The two days Finovate showcase the latest and greatest innovation in the financial and banking technology from a mixture of leading established companies and hot new startups such as Switchless.
