I’m the first woman to lead Royal Mint in 1,100 years: How Anne Jessop aims to strike gold

Bold vision: The Royal Mint has added three new business arms since Anne Jessopp became its chief executive

At first, it is difficult to believe that the elegant jewellery boutique in Mayfair’s Burlington Arcade is an outpost of The Royal Mint. 

But look closely, and beneath displays of sparkly necklaces are rows of tiny gold and silver bars.

That’s more like it.

The jewellery line, named 886, is one of several enterprises launched by the Mint’s chief executive, Anne Jessopp.

It is still in its early days – with the store opening its doors less than a year ago.

With items worn by musician Elton John and actress Ruth Wilson, it has become the most visible part of the shake-up of Britain’s oldest company at a time when the use of coins, its bread and butter for more than a millennium, is falling rapidly.

‘I really wanted to make sure that, with the decline of coins, I really left Royal Mint in a great state – that actually, it wasn’t on my watch that the company became smaller,’ she says.

Although most chief executives will feel the pressure when they take over a company, Jessopp has the weight of 1,100 years of history hanging over her head.

The Royal Mint was founded in London in the 880s to make currency, and it has produced coins for around 40 countries, from Australia to Thailand and many Caribbean nations.

For centuries, coins were minted at the Tower of London, but around 60 years ago the Treasury-owned group moved its factory to Llantrisant in Wales, around 10 miles north of Cardiff.

Although cash was already decreasing in circulation before Covid struck, at a rate of around five per cent per year, the pandemic accelerated this trend.

Jessopp, 60, has been in the top job for five years now, though she has been at the company since 2008 and was well aware that the shift was under way.

‘We knew at the time that cash was reducing in use, and I think my style has always looking at the big picture,’ she says.

‘We did a lot of work thinking about the different options, and then moved from being an organisation where circulating coins was the biggest piece of our business to having six businesses now – with circulating currency our smallest driver of profits.’

Jessopp’s rise to the top has been unusual.

She has an economics degree, but she moved up through the ranks of companies that include Rolls-Royce, the RAC and The Royal Mint itself via the human resources department.

This is the type of pre-chief executive career that some City folk still sneer at, finding it more palatable when finances bosses or technocrats ascend to the highest echelons.

Jessopp believes that, even though some people take it less seriously, HR was the perfect training ground.

‘One of the things I really specialised in was change management in organisations that had a really rich history but just needed to have a new strategy,’ she says, adding that the key was to avoid losing what was important to them as an organisation.

‘What that meant was that, in time, I became able to do the strategy myself.’

Many people, she thinks, expect a chief executive to know everything – but she disagrees.

‘I think the role of a chief executive is no longer that of an expert. What you need to have is a team of experts and you need to trust them. I look back and human resources feels like really great experience for being the chief executive.’

Although it may not be her expertise, Jessopp has turned the company’s direction towards natural, rather than human, resources and sustainability.

By the time that she took the reins, it already had a separate precious metals investment business, a commemorative coin business and ran The Royal Mint Experience tourist attraction.

Under her watch, the company has added a historic coins business and she has created two other new arms: 886 and a precious metals recycling group. The recycling business could, in the long term, prove to be the most lucrative.

When they were in the early stages of planning the shake-up, Jessopp says they sent one of their people off to do research and he returned with the idea of using ground-breaking technology developed by a Canadian company called Excir to extract precious metals at room temperature from electronic waste.

Does Jessopp think this will seem to the public like too much of a deviation to Royal Mint’s traditional work?

Absolutely not, she says.

‘Our vision is all about precious metals, so that guided us. We said right, that’s our DNA. Customers and employees will be able to understand. Perhaps if we had opened a hotel or something, people would say, ‘Why would the Royal Mint do that?”

Excir’s chemistry means 99 per cent of the gold contained in the circuit boards of discarded laptops and mobile phones can be reclaimed and used either in its coins or in jewellery.

The 886 range, which counts renowned jeweller Dominic Jones as its creative designer, already uses silver that is recovered from old NHS X-rays.

As well as recycling materials, the extension of Royal Mint’s work also promises that some of its staff could be redeployed to different parts of the business.

Some of the coin-making staff can be moved to the recycling arm, Jessopp explains, as the work is quite similar.

And the expertise of its engineers has proven useful when it comes to making bracelets.

‘British craftsmanship is core to who we are,’ she says.

‘We’ve never made jewellery. So we set the task for the engineers, and one of the things they did was to develop a way to strike the bangles. And we use the same machines and the same sort of methodology as we use to make coins, which also makes them around 30 per cent stronger than normal jewellery and shinier.’

The benefit of having golden eggs in several different baskets is that if one part of the business is struggling, another can balance it out.

‘Sometimes when the gold price is up, then our precious metals business may be doing really well, then at other times vice versa.’

Currently, the biggest part of the company by profit is the precious metals investment arm.

This includes the surprisingly heavy bars on sale at Burlington Arcade, its ‘digi-gold’ that allows customers to buy a sliver of a gold or silver bar online, and a separate exchange-traded commodity (ETC).

The Royal Mint was the first sovereign mint in Europe to list a physically-backed gold ETC, which allows investors to generally track the price of the yellow metal.

One big question remains: Is Jessopp’s new strategy working?

The early signs are promising. Revenues reached £1.9billion last year, up from £1.4 billion during the previous year.

Profits, on the other hand, slid from £18million to £13million, though this came as the company ramped up investment in precious metals recycling.

As a dividend-paying company owned by the Treasury, Royal Mint’s financial success matters to all Britons.

It may take time to tell whether Jessopp’s plans will pay off.

But as the country’s oldest company, it’s probably not in any great hurry.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk