Making Smart Connections to Leverage Smart Contracts | FF News at MPE

At MPE the merchants are a big deal and a lot is made of the opportunity to network with them and establish connections with payments providers and professionals. We’ve already got some of their thoughts on the conference and we got the chance to speak to one of them in greater depth.

In the video above we speak to Karl Wiesner from Sandock Austral, a South African leader in Marine, Defence and Aerospace engineering. They claim to be the largest “Black Owned” defence company in South Africa and according to their website, their model is to “harness the available local talent, which has been responsible for development and industrialization of cutting-edge Intellectual Property and to consolidate it into a sizeable transformed defence and commercial technology company.”

Coming off the back of a merchant workshop, we spoke to Karl, who is MD of Integrated Systems at Sandock. As they’re dealing with the rest of Africa primarily, he was grateful for the opportunity to network with and make connections with people in the payments industry.

In the interview he explains what works about MPE, including the easy opportunities for meet and greet as well as the relaxed nature of the conference.

One of his main focuses is on the area of the blockchain and smart contracts. There is increasing regulation and focus on this in Europe and Karl feels that it could play a role in their work.

Major players are beginning to offer more of this technology as a means of executing complex agreements and EY recently launched a new blockchain solution to manage business contracts. This is something that could come in handy for Sandock Austral so there’s a clear desire here to learn more. Smart contracts are a powerful tool for automating tasks on a blockchain and we’re likely to see more and more of it, going forwards.

It’s a big mover for their company and he was keen to enable communication on this topic and engender collaboration that could help them connect with the rest of Africa.

To find out more, watch the video above and check out the rest of our coverage from MPE, in Berlin.