In this episode, Duncan McLeod interviews Sonny Fisher, founder of the Forus Global Digital Exchange, a company that hopes to reinvent the financial services industry using blockchain technology.

The platform, which has been in development for the past eight years, is meant to achieve “true financial inclusion” by offering zero-fee financial services to the poorest and most neglected communities in South African and worldwide.

The company, which plans to list on the JSE – and which should achieve a market valuation north of R5bn, according to Fisher – is using the blockchain to build a digital rival to Mastercard and Visa.

“The Forus Global Digital Exchange is a public utility blockchain and ecosystem solution that will provide a single, global, universal, trusted, user-authentication platform for both mobile and Web-based transactions, for the banked and the unbanked,” the company said.

With the platform, Fisher wants to enable access to a host of financial services for millions previously excluded from the formal economy.

The payment functionality will be made available to all banks, financial institutions, merchants, application developers and corporate enterprises, and will allow anyone to use the free payment gateway with a built-in advertising platform.

In the podcast, Fisher talks about Forus’s launch plans, why the company is using Port Elizabeth as its testbed, why it will target South Africa, the US and the Caribbean first, and why it expects to sign up more than 100m members in quick succession.

He also talks about the planned listing on the main board of the JSE and how the platform will work in practice.

It’s a great podcast. Don’t miss it!