“Gold is going peer to peer and mobile,” Tilikum Investments co-founder Jodi Stanton explains. 

Tilikum’s app, which is due to be launched in the third quarter of 2016, lets users around the world acquire, hold and exchange any amount of gold using any online device.

Anyone with a mobile phone is a potential customer, however the private company is initially targeting the global US$650 billion dollar remittance market – the money sent home by workers abroad.

“Remittances are a lifeline to millions of people and our app is helping to solve a social as well as a business problem,” Stanton said. 

According to the World Bank, Australia’s outbound remittance market is worth more than AU$16 billion a year to countries like China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Stanton said the Tilikum service offered numerous benefits over traditional bank transfers, which have fees averaging more than 14% and can take days to arrive. She said there was also a good chance that recipients would prefer to keep their transfer in gold, as their local currencies have often been mismanaged and inflationary by comparison.

The company has impressive financial and technical clout behind the development.

Tilikum was founded in 2013 by senior executives, entrepreneurs, and scientists from Microsoft, McKinsey & Co, JP Morgan, and Price Waterhouse. They have brought extensive experience across foreign exchange, banking, payments, web development and cyber-security to the table, which has been critical in assembling the right set of features and technologies for the service.

The team has now solved the technical, logistical, and regulatory hurdles to make a practical gold-based mobile payment system a reality.

The team set itself four non-negotiable ground rules in developing the service: it had to be based on individual customer ownership of allocated physical gold, it had to reach any mobile device (not just smart phones), it had to have institutional bank grade security, and it had to comply with existing banking regulations.

Tilikum co-founder Mark Pey said one of the key challenges the team faced was regulatory.

“We made major modifications to our platform architecture along the way to accommodate the requirements of banking regulators,” he said. “And we knew customers would need the comfort of knowing the service was fully compliant with everything from consumer protections to anti-money laundering laws.”

The role of gold in world commerce has been sidelined in favour of bank currencies, which were more liquid and convenient to own and exchange. 

“The fact that nearly everyone on the planet now has a mobile phone in their hands changes everything,” Pey said. “It means there is now a ubiquitous distribution and usage channel that’s available 24/7, from Kalgoorlie to Kathmandu”.

Tilikum is utilising gold, given its long history as a reliable form of currency. “As banker JP Morgan once said, ‘money is gold … everything else is credit’,” Pey said.

Gold bugs would agree, and Tilikum believes holding gold in a transactional account is increasingly attractive as bank currencies earn less interest and debt levels reach all-time highs.

“Bank currencies are a fabulous means of exchange, no question about it, but they have not been reliable stores of purchasing power,” Pey said.

“This is a point the central bankers seem to prefer to forget, but as anyone buying a house or paying for everything from groceries to school fees can attest, it’s not how much you have that counts, it’s how much you can buy with it.”

Tilikum is tapping into the expanding model of peer-to-peer business – such as Uber, Airbnb and crowdfunding websites – and will reward users with referral fees. It will also enable users to exchange gold with contacts inside existing social networking sites like Facebook and WeChat.

“It’s no secret that the global audience already spends most of their time in these apps, and we wanted customers to be able to transfer value right inside these environments rather than having to get customers to add our app one by one,” Stanton said.

Tilikum said many potential customers in developing countries relied on feature phones with limited functions and slow network connections but they would still be able to use the platform. 

“There are 2 billion people in developing countries who have a phone but no bank account – we didn’t want them to be excluded from using the system, plus we believe it’s a great unserved market,” Stanton said.

Tilikum’s revenue model is built on account fees, transaction fees and dealing spreads. 

The Tilikum team is now sourcing funding for the current investment round, which closes on June 30.

Development to date has been funded by the founders and two prior rounds from external private investors and senior advisors.

“We’re getting good interest, especially from resources investors looking to diversify their gold-related investments a little further along the gold supply chain,” Pey said.

“There has also been interest from people who think a system like ours could drive further demand by making gold useful for people again in their everyday lives.”