App arrives that allows you to pay in shops with gold and buy it on your smartphone

In times when geopolitical and economic uncertainty is giving wings to a traditional safe haven asset like gold, going to pay for a coffee with the equivalent of a bar might not be a good idea. But from the beginning of April, anyone will be able to do so through an app that integrates the possibility of investing directly in physical gold with that of using the same metal to pay in shops and online, quickly and easily.

On the other hand, gold has been used throughout history to mint coins for common use, and Solidus, which takes its name from the Roman gold coin coined by Constantine the Great, wants to bring back that function that has now been abandoned thanks to the contribution of digital. "Over the course of time it has been transformed into raw material, but today gold is the only true currency, a medium of exchange that does not devalue: we want people to return to considering it as such, not just as an investment tool," explains Aldo Carrara, Coo and majority shareholder of the Carrara Group, a company that has been trading, recovering and processing precious metals for over half a century.

He is the creator of the project that led to the creation of Solidus, a platform that allows you to trade in physical gold directly from your smartphone, buying and selling on the basis of the current price on the spot market, but also to use it to make daily payments, even for small amounts. Within the app there are two wallets. One is a fiat wallet, consisting of a bank account into which funds for the purchase of the metal can flow, connected to a Mastercard debit card. The service is made possible, in banking-as-a-service mode, thanks to the collaboration with Treezor, an electronic money institution of the Société Générale group. Alongside this is the wallet linked to the gold, in which the physical metal purchased is deposited, which can be left on the platform - Solidus guarantees safekeeping in high-security vaults with reserves certified by a third-party body - or be sent home, in the form of traditional bars or in special customised forms, at extra cost.

"The platform," Carrara continues, "allows anyone to invest in gold, simply and safely. On Solidus we only deal in physical gold, we do not deal in financial forms of gold that replicate the value and trend of the metal'. There is currently only one subscription plan, where everything is free of charge, minus a fixed transaction fee of one euro per gram and card costs. The minimum transaction is set at two grams.

At any time, the 'gold reserve' can be tapped for daily expenses. If the funds in the card-linked account are not sufficient to complete the payment, the app automatically evaluates the gold transfer needed based on the market price at the time. The two accounts thus function as communicating vessels that compensate each other in a matter of seconds, thanks to the platform developed by GrowishPay, an Italian embedded finance specialist. Given the performance of gold, which continues to go from one record to the next, there is no shortage of retail interest: Solidus thus aims to reach 'a few tens of thousands' of customers in the space of not too long.