Four people can each say “I bought gold this morning” and mean four completely different things. One owns units in a fund. One owns a contract that pays out if the price rises. One owns a claim against a company that owns some gold somewhere. One owns identified bars sitting in a vault. They are not variations of the same product. They are different products with different risks, and only one of them involves owning metal.
Here is the honest map:
The Four Categories:
Gold ETFs. You own units in a fund, and the fund owns gold held by a custodian. You are not the metal’s owner — the fund is. In exchange you get low cost, deep liquidity, and the ability to buy and sell through an ordinary brokerage account. Physical delivery is theoretically possible in most structures but practically restricted to institutions dealing in very large blocks. For someone who wants price exposure inside a portfolio, an ETF is a perfectly sensible instrument.
Contracts for difference and price-tracking apps. You own a contract with a provider. No gold exists anywhere in the arrangement — the provider owes you money if the price moves your way. These are cheap to enter, often leveraged, and designed for short holding periods. What they are not is a way to own gold.
Unallocated and pooled accounts. The most widely sold, and the least understood. You are credited with a quantity of gold, and the provider maintains a stock of metal somewhere behind it. But no specific bar is yours. You own a claim against the provider, not property.
Providers describe this in various ways — “pool allocated,” “an allocation against our inventory,” “fractional ownership of shared bars.” Read carefully and the same feature usually appears: the provider may re-allocate, substitute, or manage the underlying metal at its discretion. That is not a criticism of any particular firm; it is how the model works, and it is often paired with genuinely low costs. It just means you should know which side of the line you are on.
Allocated physical gold. Specific, identified bars are recorded in your name. The metal is your property. The company you bought from is a custodian looking after something that belongs to you.
The Four Questions that separate them:
The third row is the one that matters most, and the one almost nobody checks before buying.
Why the insolvency question is the real dividing line:
Price risk applies to all four. Gold can fall, and no structure protects you from that.
Counterparty risk is different, and it is where the categories genuinely diverge.
If you own a claim — unallocated, pooled, or contractual — and the provider becomes insolvent, you are a creditor. You submit a claim, you join the queue, and you recover whatever the estate can pay. The gold behind your position, if any exists, may be an asset of the company and therefore available to everyone it owes money to.
If you own identified metal held by a custodian, the position is different in kind rather than degree. The bars are not the company’s property, so they cannot be distributed to the company’s creditors. There is no queue to join, because there is nothing to claim — the gold is already yours, and the process is one of returning identified property to its identified owner.
That is the distinction. Everything else is detail.
Where FinMet sits:
We are in the fourth category, and we built the product specifically so we could be.
You buy in whole grams, from one gram, in Singapore dollars. When your payment clears, specific 1-gram bars of 99.99% purity Swiss-made gold — produced by Valcambi SA of Switzerland, an LBMA Good Delivery refiner — are allocated to you and recorded in your name. Title passes to you at that point.
The metal is held by Helveticor (SG) Pte. Ltd., a specialist precious-metals custodian in Singapore, and you can log in to the custodian’s own system to verify what is yours. It is segregated, insured at full replacement value, never lent, never pledged, and not on FinMet’s balance sheet. Storage costs nothing for the first three years from each purchase, and you can redeem physical bars in whole 10-gram multiples.
Choosing honestly:
If you want cheap, liquid price exposure inside a portfolio, an ETF is a good answer and we would not pretend otherwise.
If you want to own gold — the metal, identified, yours, retrievable — then the question to ask any provider is not what their fees are. It is whether a specific bar is recorded in your name, and what happens to it if they cease to exist.
Ask it before you send money. A provider who answers clearly is telling you something. So is one who doesn’t.
Finmet Pte Ltd (UEN 202022529N) is a registered dealer under the Precious Stones and Precious Metals Act 2019 (PS20240000367). Registration is for anti-money-laundering supervision; FinMet is not a bank, does not take deposits, and does not provide financial advice. Gold prices can fall as well as rise.