Digital gold: Airtel Payments Bank, Paytm look to cash in on appetite for gold

While India’s love for gold dates back to centuries, here’s how in today’s day and age this love is growing digitally. Financial advisors too are now betting big on digital forms of gold for investing purposes as it is much safer and cost efficient. The coronavirus-led lockdowns have only been a catalyst for this shift of investments to e-gold rather than the conventional form of physical gold investments.

Airtel Payments Bank just launched DigiGold, a digital platform for its customers to make investments in gold last week. DigiGold has been launched in partnership with SafeGold, a provider of digital gold.

Options for customers

With DigiGold, Airtel Payments Bank’s savings account customers will now be able to invest in 24 carat gold using the Airtel Thanks app. Customers can also gift DigiGold to their family and friends, who have a savings account with Airtel Payments Bank.

“Gold purchased by customers is stored securely by SafeGold at no additional cost and can be sold through Airtel Thanks app at any time in a matter of few clicks,” Airtel Payments Bank said in a statement.

“DigiGold is the latest addition to the company’s neo-banking proposition of simple, secure, and value-driven products,” said Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, COO, Airtel Payments Bank.

Options

PhonePe, Paytm, SafeGold, Google Pay, MobiKwik and other mobile e-wallets, as well as online banking apps and websites are also offering their platforms to investors to buy digital gold.

In the case of Paytm Payments Bank – it offers Paytm Gold wherein 24 carat pure gold can be purchased for an amount up to Rs 1 crore and the buyers can take delivery of the physical gold. Paytm gold can also be accumulated through Gold SIP as a regular saving option.

“Over the last three years, among Paytm’s over 500 million users have purchased digital gold on their platforms,” said Paytm Money chief executive officer (CEO) Varun Sridhar.

Wealth management startup Groww, which started operations through WhatsApp groups five years ago and recently achieved the tag of unicorn, is also riding the growth in middle-class incomes and the large-scale shift to online investing. The Bengaluru-based company offers investments in digital gold apart from mutual funds, stocks, IPOs and ETFs.

Gold’s lustre

There is little doubt that gold as an investing class is seen as a small albeit important part of investment portfolios. Looking at the returns gold has given, financial advisors are bullish on the yellow metal.

Gold prices in the post-pandemic world will continue to depend on several factors such as global economic growth, interest rates, rising US yield, inflation, and more.

What is important as per experts is to diversify with 5-10%of one’s portfolio in gold preferably through paper-gold investments.