Royal Mint (UK) wants to start grading its own coins?

AlanLastufka

I just got an email from the Royal Mint (UK) and they wanted me to take a 5 minute survey, in it they asked a bunch of questions like "do you understand what graded coins are? do you buy them? where do you buy them from?" etc...

Then they asked "would you buy graded coins from a service other than your preferred grader?" and "would you buy them from a new grading service?". They then asked if I'd buy coins "graded directly by the mint"... so I assume the Royal Mint wants to start offering graded coins next to their raw coins.

Which might be a good way to guarantee you get a high quality coin, even if you're gonna cross it to PCGS when you get it, but it would make me very hesitant to buy any "raw" coins from them in the future, assuming I'm getting the 68s and below as they would have slabbed the 69s and 70s.

Exbrit

Interesting. Attitudes are changing slowly over there. More and more slabbed auctions - now possibly this.

Rexford

The point of a grading service is that it’s supposed to be a third party.

pruebas

@AlanLastufka I think your assumption might be wrong.

While I have not seen the actual questions from the Royal Mint, from what you wrote above "graded directly from the Mint" might just mean that the mint did the submission to the third-party service and sold the resulting graded coins to you (as opposed to you buying the graded coins from someone like Apmex). I don't think this question was related to the "new grading service" question.

As for the "new grading service," maybe they are having some kind of difficulties with NGC (or PCGS) such as lead times or Customs, or even attributions, and wanted to "invest" in a new UK-based grading service to remove those obstacles. They were testing the waters if their global customer base would accept another firm's slabs.

I highly doubt that the UK government (whom I believe owns the Royal Mint) wants to be guaranteeing coins.

7Jaguars

Yes, my read as well.

thefinn

“Follow the money.”

deepblue30

Hi Everyone
First post and a topic that I can speak about, I would think that anything the Royal Mint can do to improve the quality of products that they release would benefit collectors in the long term. The Australian Mint have been producing coins graded in the 70's for the last 20 years. It's hard to get a coin graded from the Royal Mint sets in the highest grades. The last couple of years the finish has been much better but there is still some to go.

CopperWire

They are partnered with NGC and you can purchase these "graded from the mint" coins on the open market.

Namvet69

Does the RM holder display NGC info? Peace Roy