HelloGold was launched with the promise to democratise gold — like so many other start-ups and cryptocurrencies gunning for an ICO…The difference is that we’re really doing it. As in right now. In Malaysia. Day in, day out, for the last 3 months since our public launch.

And how are we faring? It’s still early days but our customer base is already shaping up in a very interesting way…

Our customers are overwhelmingly young and urban

There’s a perception that buying gold is an old-fashioned habit that our grandparents used to have. After all, in the age of structured financial products, robot advisers and ubiquitous plastic money, who wants to buy good old gold for investment? It turns out it’s the young and urban! 41% of our customers are under 30 years old and 39% are between 30 to 40 years old. Overall 80% are less than 40 years old. Geographically 45% of our customers are in the urban states of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, which is a massive over-representation in these areas. For reference our marketing has been based on email and SMS campaigns sent to a fairly representative customer database across Malaysia, although somewhat overweight in Johor and underweight in Sabah and Sarawak.

They start low but then go high

One of HelloGold’s hero propositions is that you can start buying gold with as little as RM1 — and indeed many do! Customers are obviously testing us out. Once they feel that we are trustworthy balances grow quickly. The average gold balance currently stands at 2.28g (RM450 or roughly US$110 at current prices). 20% of our customers bought more than 1g (c.RM180 at current prices) and 4% of customers have bought more than 10g (c.RM1,800 at current prices). At the top end a few have bought more than 100g in total and the maximum single transaction value so far was RM10,000.

They buy to save

88% of our customers that have bought gold have not sold any. Instead they keep accumulating more, especially when the price dips. This is heart-warming as we see gold as a long term tool to protect savings as opposed to a commodity to speculate and trade frequently.

For most the app is already a part of their daily lives

Our usage stats show that customers on average log in almost once a day (0.8 to be precise). 20% log in more than once a day, and half of these log in more than twice a day. At the extreme scale, our top 1% most engaged customers log in more than 10x per day!

These are great results. There is obviously a lot more to do. We’d like to have more women as customers. More customers from the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak. More families as group, and so on and so forth…It will happen as we release more features and explore broader marketing channels.

In the meantime I feel we’ve taken a big first step in engaging a new segment for gold. Young millennials are notoriously bad savers. And yet we’re managing to bring them onto our gold journey, thanks to a modern app and a very low cost of entry (RM1!). I’d say it’s a good start to our mission to democratise gold. And soon, when we deploy our lending product, we’ll be helping these young customers get access to bank credit, thus promoting financial inclusion. That is something that I’m very much looking forward to.