How is Singapore different from other major bullion vaulting locations?

Traditionally, the most common locations for precious metals’ vaulting services around the world have been New York, London, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. Recently there have been a lot of uncertainties with political turmoil both in the east and west.

For New York and London, with recent US presidential elections and Brexit, most of our customers’ feedback was that they were concerned about the uncertainties of these events and the macroeconomic instability in general. Some of our clients are even worried of (another) gold confiscation Executive Order similar to the one in the USA in 1933. Furthermore, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the regulations such as FATCA and CRS (Common Reporting Standards) causing many customers to look for alternative wealth protection choices outside of the financial system. A good indicator of these concerns is that, with the exception of Singapore, about of our new clients in 2016 are from the US and Europe.

As for Shanghai and Hong Kong, we have also seen a shift in the sentiments among some of our clients. China has been accumulating physical gold over the past years has banned all the exports of gold. As Hong Kong is increasingly operating under influence from Beijing, there are concerns that the nationalizations (and even possible confiscations) can occur with an order from the Government. Customers are therefore increasingly looking for alternative jurisdictions for storing their precious metals and for our Asian clients Singapore is a natural choice.

Click to find out more reasons of why Singapore is one of the best jurisdictions for bullion storage in the world.