Where your gold actually is
Most people who buy gold online never find out what happens after they press confirm. The website says the metal is in a vault. Which vault? Whose name is on it? What if the company disappears? Those are the right questions. Here is the full chain — one gram, from your bank transfer to the moment you could walk out of a vault holding it.
Step 1: You pay, in Singapore dollars, from your own bank account
You buy in whole grams, starting from one. Payment is by PayNow — the only method FinMet accepts — from a bank account in your own name, verified through Singpass before you ever transact.
That last detail matters more than it looks. Because every account is Singpass-verified and every payment travels a traceable rail, there is no anonymous money on the platform, and no scenario in which funds arrive from a person we cannot identify. It is also why sale proceeds can only ever return to your own verified PayNow account. Money enters and leaves along the same identified path.
Step 2: Your grams are allocated to identified bars
This is the step that separates owning gold from owning a claim on gold.
FinMet holds physical 1-gram bars of 99.99% purity Swiss-made gold, produced by Valcambi SA of Switzerland — an LBMA Good Delivery refiner. When your payment clears, specific bars are recorded against your name. Not a share of a pool. Not an entry in a ledger that says you are owed a gram. Identified bars, allocated to you.
Where we hold sufficient unallocated stock of the relevant denomination, allocation happens automatically on cleared funds. Where we do not, it completes within two weeks.
Title passes to you at allocation, not at purchase. We say this plainly because the distinction is the whole point of the structure, and because a platform that blurs it is telling you something about itself.
Step 3: The metal sits with a custodian who is not us
Your gold is held by Helveticor (SG) Pte. Ltd., a specialist precious-metals custodian operating to internationally recognised security standards, in Singapore.
Helveticor is a separate company. We do not own it, and it does not own us. That separation is deliberate as the party holding the metal should not be the same party selling it to you.
The vaulted gold is covered by an all-risks insurance policy at full replacement value.
Step 4: You can take it out
Once your grams are allocated, you can hold them, sell them back at the live price, or take the metal.
Physical redemption is available in whole 10-gram multiples. Because you hold 1-gram bars and redemption is fulfilled in 10-gram bars, the exchange works like this: ten of your 1-gram bars are deallocated and one identified 10-gram bar of the same purity is allocated in their place. Same total weight, gram for gram. No price applied, no fee, no spread. Your title continues without interruption.
You then collect it in person, or have it delivered insured within Singapore.
Storage costs nothing for three years from each purchase.
What happens to your gold if FinMet ceases to exist
Here is the paragraph that does the real work.
Your gold is in your legal title. In plain terms: the metal is your property, and FinMet is only its custodian. We hold it for you, the way a cloakroom holds a coat.
The consequences follow directly:
It is not on our balance sheet. It is not a FinMet asset. It never was.
We cannot lend it, pledge it, or use it as collateral. Not for financing, not for liquidity, not for anything.
Our creditors cannot reach it. If FinMet became insolvent, an administrator could not distribute your gold to people we owe money to, because it is not ours to distribute. You are an owner, not a creditor standing in a queue.
The metal stays where it is. It does not move to us, because it was never with us. It sits with Helveticor, allocated to you, and the process is one of returning identified property to its identified owner — not of unwinding a claim.
This is why the structure is worth understanding before you buy anywhere. A pooled or unallocated account makes you a creditor of the company. If that company fails, you join the line. Allocated bailment makes you an owner, and owners do not queue.
The registration, for the record
FinMet is operated by Finmet Pte Ltd (UEN 202022529N), a Singapore company, and is a registered dealer under the Precious Stones and Precious Metals Act 2019, registration number PS20240000367. We are a member of the Singapore Bullion Market Association and hold its Retail Best Practices certification.
Registration under the PSPM Act is for anti-money-laundering supervision. It is not a licence from MAS, and FinMet is not a bank and does not take deposits.
Gold prices can fall as well as rise. But whatever the price does, the question of whose gold it is should never be in doubt — and now you know exactly how to check.