The Governor of the Central Bank of Morocco, Abdellatif Jouahri, called blockchain technology disruptive at the Africa Blockchain Summit in Rabat, Morocco.

The Africa Blockchain Summit was held on Thursday, November 21st in Rabat, the capital city of Morocco. The conference focused on “Blockchain at the service of the financial sector” in Morocco and the rest of Africa.

The Bank Al-Maghrib governor, Abdellatif Jouhari described blockchain as “disruptive” during his speech at the event. He said:

The Blockchain, and more broadly the distributed general ledger (DLT) technology, is by far the most disruptive technology of this decade. It is often presented as an innovation of equal importance as the rise of Internet, considering its contributions which would revolutionize digital value exchange between individuals and substantially transform the business models.

Beyond blockchain technology, Jouhari mentioned Bitcoin, Stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) as blockchain-based innovations in the financial sector.

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Jouhari also discussed how Morroco intends to use financial technology to fuel financial inclusion in the North African state. For Jouhari, financial inclusion is very important because it gives “all individuals and businesses a fair access to formal financial products and services … in order to promote economic and social inclusion.”

Morroco has seen some steady blockchain developments in the past. The country partnered with international organizations to conduct the world’s first likely cross-border securities settlement between two central depositories based on the Quartz blockchain.

The Africa Blockchain Summit 2019 in Rabat also featured 4 roundtable discussions on blockchain technology. The roundtable discussions focused on how blockchain is disrupting the financial industry, the challenges blockchain technology posses for regulators, cryptocurrency assets and the new use cases of blockchain technology.

Moving forward it will be interesting to see how the positive sentiments shared by the Governer of the Morocco central bank will translate into regulation and adoption in the country.