The Royal Mint's Anne Jessopp: 'We didn't want the Mint to cease to exist on our watch'

In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in September, throngs of fashion elites were flocking to a makeshift catwalk along the French capital’s Avenue de Saxe.

Anne Jessopp is the chief executive of the Royal Mint, an institution founded in 886 to make the country’s currency. It forged and minted coins at the Tower of London until 1968, when the company – which is wholly owned by the Treasury – moved to Llantrisant.

The Preston-born economics graduate first joined the Royal Mint in 2009, having worked in the human resources departments of companies including Rolls-Royce, Procter & Gamble, and the RAC. She arrived at the Mint just as the government shelved plans for its sale.

Jessopp was put in charge of supporting its transformation from a government agency into its own limited company, still fully owned by the Treasury. At the time, currency circulation was still its biggest business, accounting for about 58% of revenues and generating £10.7m in pre-tax profits, alongside a smaller commemorative coin division.

Fast forward 16 years and the circulating coins business last posted a £13m annual loss. It is a symptom of a years-long decline in cash use accelerated by the pandemic, when lockdowns and health fears cut hand-to-hand contact and boosted card payments. While cash is still used by many as a way to stick to budgets, the overall trend has taken its toll. This year, for the first time, Treasury officials did not make an annual order for new coins to be minted for general circulation.

That has prompted some hard decisions. For one thing, while the Mint will continue supplying UK coins on request, it emerged in April that it was pulling out of the overseas coin supply market.

It is part of a wider diversification strategy that bosses, including Jessopp – who was appointed chief executive in 2018 – have deployed to transform the business. “We didn’t want it to be on our watch that the Royal Mint cease to exist,” she said.

Diversifying the portfolio has meant growing some of its smaller businesses. That has resulted in a fresh international push for its commemorative coin range, and working to expand the appeal of its gold investment arm. The chief executive introduced gold bars starting at £100 and exchange-traded commodities (ETCs) via the London Stock Exchange to draw in more young and female investors.

But Jessopp knew more needed to be done. “We had to come up with some new businesses. We put together a team to look at what the opportunities were.” Some ideas – such as a Royal Mint-branded zip wire over the Bristol channel – never left the drawing board. But others stuck.

This included its 886 jewellery line. Since launching in 2022, with an online store and shopfront in the swanky Burlington Arcade in London, it has cornered a segment of the market interested in sustainable, British-made luxury items. And with bestsellers such as a £2,076 18-carat gold ring and a £345 quarter-sovereign pendant necklace, it has lured big spenders and now boasts celebrity customers including the actor Cate Blanchett, U2’s Adam Clayton and the musician James Blake.

But a need for a steady supply of sustainable gold also opened the door to another opportunity: precious metals recycling.

In August, Jessopp unveiled a “pioneering” factory that recovers gold from electronic waste, creating a more sustainable source of the precious metal for the coin manufacturer’s luxury jewellery line. The factory in south Wales, which has been under construction since March 2022, is designed to extract gold from up to 4,000 tonnes a year of circuit boards sourced in the UK from electronics, including phones, laptops and TVs, with the help of patented new chemistry created by Canadian clean technology firm Excir.

Jessopp says it now has the rights to set up factories with similar recycling programmes in other countries, potentially creating a new export for the 1,000-year-old firm. “We’ve got the international licence to run similar factories right around the world. So we’re working with Excir and another partner to look at what that will look like.

“We sort of have found ourselves at the forefront of a new industry,” she added.

The hope, ultimately, is that 886 – which is due to break even next year – would make up about 20% of profits in the long-term, with another 20% from the e-waste recycling business.

“We’re still investing in our new businesses. So this next couple of years, we’re going to still be on that crossover, but we’ve got a trajectory to be really moving forward,” Jessopp says.