SINGAPORE — As the cashless movement picks up pace in Singapore and worldwide, the Singapore Mint has had to come up with innovative ways to keep its businesses going.

Mr Yip Pak Ling, director of the coin-minting company, told TODAY that he is hatching a plan to start a first-in-the-world exchange platform where graded coins could be traded with greater transparency between buyers, sellers and coin dealers.

Graded coins are coins that have been assigned a grade based on an assessment of its condition using criteria such as preservation, luster, colour and attractiveness. A grade of 70 is the highest and 1 is the lowest.

Mr Yip hopes to set up the exchange platform in 2020 and will be trying to get international dealers and collectors on board.

Currently, graded coins are bought and sold either at auction houses or through second-hand dealers.

Those sold at auction houses are usually very rare and expensive. Most other transactions tend to take place between individual dealers and sellers, through an opaque process, Mr Yip said. 

“These are over-the-counter trades. It’s a grey market. Besides the buyer and seller, no one knows the transaction value,” he said.  “Currently, there (isn’t a) website to tell you how much a particular coin is valued.”

And this is something Mr Yip hopes to change through the exchange platform, on which coin dealers and collectors would be able to register their coins and put them up for sale. Interested buyers would then be able to place bids on these coins.

A list of the last traded price of the coins would be published on the platform every month.

This would all make for a much more transparent process, Mr Yip said.

His ultimate vision is for graded coins to one day be recognised as a legitimate investment asset class and even be accepted as a collateral.

“Instead of pledging your house, you could pledge a coin,” Mr Yip suggested. This could happen once the market for graded coins becomes mature enough that they are accepted by banks and financial institutions.

And they would only be prepared to do so when there is transparent market and pricing process, he added.

But Mr Yip recognises that the journey to that stage will be a “long and tedious process”. 

The Singapore Mint has started on this path by being appointed by the Certified Collectibles Group (CCG) as an official submission centre, through which individuals can submit their personal coin collections to be graded.

The CCG is a set of independent third-party companies focused on the expert authentication, grading and conservation of collectibles.

The Singapore Mint will submit the coins it receives to one of CCG’s independent member companies Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), which is based in the United States.

Members of the public can submit their coins to the Singapore Mint for NGC grading from Jan 1 next year.

The commemorative coins that The Singapore Mint is launching next year will not be graded, but the leftover stock of commemorative coins launched between 2016 and this year will be sent for NGC grading and put up for sale from Jan 1.

While it embarks on its grand new plan, The Singapore Mint will continue its traditional business of minting circulation coins, and Mr Yip said it hopes to be able to mint Singapore coins again.

The firm was contracted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to mint the city-state’s first and second series of Singapore coins, and is still in the traditional business of minting commemorative coins as well as coins in circulation elsewhere, such as Thailand’s 5 baht coin.

But it is not minting the current third series of Singapore coins, which has been in circulation since 2013, as the MAS awarded the tender to the Royal Canadian Mint.

While Mr Yip recognised that minting coins is a sunset industry, he believed that society will not go 100 per cent cashless.

“Someone has to do the job right? There is still a need for coins. As a mint, we have the responsibility to ensure that we are equipped with the skill set to make them,” he said.