London FinTech Glint Pay Launches Gold-Backed Debit Card

A company called Glint Pay has launched a debit card that’s backed by gold instead of currency, according to a report in The Denver Post.

The company is London-based, and its U.S. office is in Boulder, Colorado. The card was released in the U.S. on Monday (July 29).

Glint Pay was started by entrepreneur Jason Cozens.

“We want gold to be considered like any other currency,” Cozens said. “We want to give a reliable currency to the world.”

The debit card was introduced early in 2018 in Europe. Glint Pay has upwards of 50,000 downloads of its mobile app and around $50 million in transactions.

Glint Pay users use a bank account to purchase actual gold held in a vault in Switzerland, and the company charges a 0.5 percent transaction fee. Users are then given a debit card, licensed by Mastercard USA. Glint Pay is an agent of Sutton Bank, and all of the accounts are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The holdings in the vault are updated daily, and a person owns the gold until they spend it. When a person runs out of gold, the card stops working.

Many people have been using Glint to get a larger return on savings, and Cozens said if the system crashes, people can always claim their physical gold.

He said he got the idea for the business after the big financial crisis of 2008.

“Banks aren’t necessarily a secure place for your money,” he said. “They lend out more than they have.”

The company has six employees in its Boulder office, but Cozens said he plans to expand and add new functions to the platform, including the ability to send gold as a gift to people, and an expansion of the global currency wallets that the platform can handle in the U.S.