U.K. fintech company sets up U.S. offices in Boulder

BOULDER  — A British financial company trying to modernize the gold standard has set up its U.S. operations in Boulder.

Glint Pay Inc. set up its American headquarters in Boulder, according to a press release issued Monday. The company was formed in 2015 and launched its app in Europe last year.

The program, available via the Apple App Store and Google Play, allows customers to deposit funds and exchange them into foreign currencies or to buy portions of gold bars held in Switzerland for a fee. The customer then can make payments with those currencies or the gold itself, allowing Glint to sell off a fraction of the customer’s gold stores to cover the charge.

“Our mission is to bring a reliable gold currency to the fingertips of everyone in the world,” Cozens said in the release.

Glint hearkens back to the gold standard monetary system, which was the norm across the world until the Great Depression. Then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard so the federal government could increase the country’s monetary supply and spur economic recovery

In the release, Cozens argues that the U.S. dollar has only 14 percent of the purchasing power today than it had in 1970 due to inflation, but gold’s inflation-adjusted value increased by 505 percent over that time because of its status as a safe-haven commodity for investors looking to avoid the volatility of the markets.

While it has its supporters, including former U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul, most mainstream economists don’t believe the gold standard would be a good idea for the modern economy. In 2012, a panel of 40 economists surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business unanimously said the gold standard wouldn’t benefit the average American and would cripple the U.S. Federal Reserve’s ability to stimulate a depressed economy or tighten overly hot economic conditions.

The company set up in Boulder because of Colorado’s history of gold mining and the local technology talent pool, Cozen said in the statement. Glint has six employees in the office and has plans to hire in the coming months.