The Mansa Story

Making Gold as Convenient and Practical as Cash

Osman Mia
Founder, Mansa

We started investing in physical gold around 1995, before year 2000. At the time, many feared a bug in computers called the "Y2K" bug. On midnight of 1st January 2000, computers would stop functioning because years had been programmed in two digits. 1998 was "98". 1999 was "99". And 2000 would be "00"... which would cause errors and money in banks to be lost. Well, Y2K didn't happen, and we are glad.

We continued to invest even after Y2K had passed. By then, we had understood that governments were printing money, and the value of paper money would fall over time. So we would buy and hold gold, and later when we needed the cash, we would sell.

From earlier on, we saw that the big spread between the buying and selling prices makes it difficult for people like us to make a profit - even after the gold price had gone up! But we thought of it as the cost of investing and accepted it as it was.

If you had found it difficult to make a profit from gold before, look at the spread between the selling and buying prices where you got your gold. These places charge anywhere between 4% to 10% - and they even increase this spread when the gold price is rallying! The odds are stacked against you. How could you make a profit?

We soon realised that there is a way to buy and sell gold without having to bear outrageous price spreads. We worked on the idea and developed a new mechanism that makes online P2P trading of gold possible. We called it Mansa. "Mansa" was the title of the richest man ever lived, so it seemed apt.

P2P means "Peer-to-Peer". Unlike how you buy and sell gold elsewhere, on Mansa, you trade directly with other Mansa users. No more banks and gold sellers to take away the value of your gold. There is no other online platform in the world like Mansa.

Mansa is our answer to the big profits that banks and gold sellers are making and to fiat currencies that are susceptible to inflation and are worth less and less every day.

Mansa is a venture project under Mia Niaga Sdn Bhd, a company registered in Malaysia