UK Fintech Goldwise Launches ‘Gold-as-a-Service’ Infrastructure for Financial Platforms

WHY THIS MATTERS: The launch of GoldwiseConnect is a significant marker in the evolution of embedded finance, demonstrating how core financial capabilities are shifting from proprietary products to scalable infrastructure. For too long, the physical precious metals market has been fragmented and complex, presenting a high barrier to entry for digital wealth managers and banks. This new platform resolves that systemic friction by aggregating the entire value chain—from real-time pricing and execution to custody—into a single API layer. This is not just about a new product; it’s about democratizing access to a traditional asset class. The move is part of a broader fintech trend where platforms are seizing greater infrastructure ownership to reduce external dependencies and embed services directly into the customer experience. Financial institutions should care because frictionless access to alternative assets is no longer a niche feature but a competitive requirement for retaining high-value investors and driving new revenue streams. By offering an end-to-end solution for a non-traditional asset like gold, Goldwise is effectively providing “wealth-as-a-service” and setting a new operational standard for how banks and fintechs integrate physical assets.

Goldwise, the UK fintech founded by former Royal Mint executives, has launched GoldwiseConnect, a new infrastructure platform that enables financial services firms (including fintechs, banks and wealth platforms) to offer real-time trading in physical precious metals to their customers without building their own trading or custody infrastructure. 

The launch comes as financial platforms look to expand into physical assets driven by growing demand. It follows the recent rollout of Goldwise’s direct-to-consumer platform, which enables individuals to buy, manage and sell fractional physical precious metals in real time.

Built on Goldwise’s proprietary trading and custody technology, GoldwiseConnect brings together pricing, execution and asset storage into a single integrated solution. This enables partners to embed physical precious metals into their platforms quickly and efficiently without managing multiple providers or complex operational processes.

Historically, offering physical precious metals has required coordination across multiple providers, including liquidity venues, custodians, vault operators and payment systems. This fragmented set-up has created significant barriers to entry, limiting the ability for financial platforms to offer physical precious metals alongside other asset classes. 

Recent industry research, including the World Gold Council’s1 work on “gold-as-a-service”, has highlighted these structural challenges and the need for more integrated infrastructure. GoldwiseConnect has been built to address this, enabling financial platforms to connect multiple providers and offer real-time access to physical precious metals through a single, streamlined integration.

Unlike models that provide indirect exposure, GoldwiseConnect enables direct ownership of physical precious metals, supporting the full lifecycle of onboarding and funding through to trading and custody within a single platform. The platform also supports multiple precious metals, including gold, silver, platinum and palladium, across multiple currencies and custody locations.

GoldwiseConnect sits alongside the Goldwise app, forming part of a broader platform that serves both individual investors and financial institutions through a shared infrastructure. 

Gareth Tucker, Co-founder of Goldwise, said: “The industry has long discussed the need for better infrastructure for ‘digital’ gold, but in practice platforms still face significant complexity in bringing physical precious metals to market.

GoldwiseConnect solves this by providing a single infrastructure layer that handles trading, funding, custody and recordkeeping, allowing partners to focus on their customer experience rather than building and maintaining complex systems.”

Jatin Patel, Co-founder of Goldwise, added: “Physical precious metals are rarely available through existing banking and wealth platforms. Also, wealth is moving from closed platforms to programmable infrastructure, and from traditional interfaces to AI-powered access. GoldwiseConnect is designed for this shift, giving financial institutions real-time access to physical precious metals and the ability to turn user intent into executed trades through a single API. Our ambition is for Goldwise to become the underlying infrastructure powering global access to physical precious metals.” 

GoldwiseConnect is available to partners immediately, with initial integrations already underway.

Based in Cardiff, Wales, Goldwise has successfully raised £1.27 million as part of an ongoing pre-seed round, which includes funding from Angel Invest Wales which is part of the Development Bank of Wales; and business angel investors. The funding will support product development and platform growth over the next 12 to 15 months. 

For more information about GoldwiseConnect, visit www.goldwise.com/connect/

FF NEWS TAKE: This is a needle-moving development for the wealth sector, transforming physical assets from a cumbersome specialty product into a scalable embedded finance solution. By creating an integrated layer of programmable infrastructure for trading and custody, Goldwise has removed the operational excuses banks previously had for ignoring this asset class. The next logical step to watch is how quickly major wealth platforms integrate this offering and whether the firm can expand its underlying infrastructure to tokenized or other illiquid physical assets.