Goldmoney CEO|Founder Roy Sebag Addresses Goldmoney Clients

Goldmatters

nie

Also from Twitter:
"Not true. The dividend is coming from returns on capital. These issues are separate and correspond to the onerous regulatory costs (please trust me on this) which make it impossible to service someone who isn’t paying us $10 a month. It’s sad but I have no other solution."

"I don’t know if it’s concerted or not but it has cost us over $15 million in cash the last few years. It means some days I have an employee spending 6 hours on an account with $50 that earns us $.30 cents a year in revenue to provide some report to a regulator."

This is ok for me and it absolutely makes sense because of the long verification procedure we all know about. Sadly, poor people will be punished by this fee.

@Roy Sebag: Please hire a community manager and create a channel with news for the customers (payment methods, ...). The transparency is what I like about Goldmoney.

MachinistTalk

Doesn’t make sense for my goals. Thank you for the service.

Ebomb71

With all due respect but this simply is a whole lot of bulshit. Basically Goldmoney now offers almost exactly the same service as BullionVault only at a much higher cost for small and medium size holdings.

BigMouse

I am ok with the fee. Just need to get the service right. Hope the extra fee will help. I moved all my gold from personal account to holding last week. The systems says committed to finish Nov 22. It is still pending as of right now. Called twice and sent message. Will see how long it takes.

IrishGuy

So is this on top of the storage fee ?

BigMouse

Just got call from GoldMoney regarding my personal to holding transfer status. They said the transaction will be done by Monday(Dec 2). This makes me feel much better. Hope additional fee help improving the service.

GoldNRoll

I wonder why BullionVault doesn't have to comply to the same regulations. Is it because it's an Ltd?

I don't like to use "told you so" but should Goldmoney remained private, maybe all the attention it got from regulators would have been avoided.

But what was done was done, it cannot be changed so maybe looking at the good part. I was posting recently that I wonder what will happen with Goldmoney if the world governments return to a gold standard. Will it become a bank?

No we know that most of the work was done and GM already complies to the bank regulations so GM is ready to be the first world gold bank.

Speaking of BullionVault, they're backed by the WGC:

"The World Gold Council [WGC] is the market development organisation for the gold mining industry, whose members comprise the world's leading gold producers. It acquired 11% of BullionVault in June 2010.
Note: On 12th April 2016 WGC transferred its 11% holding in BullionVault to Gold Bullion Investment Trust [GBIT] which became the registered owner. GBIT is a connected organisation of WGC."

There are things about BullionVault that are fishy. I don't really know how they keep the storage prices so low and I don't understand why they don't comply to the same regulations, even if not listed.

Papercurrencyisfraud

You should never have encouraged people to migrate to holdings before introducing these extortionate fees, I will no longer be using goldmoney as I no longer trust the company or the platform. Many thanks.

plashadpobedy

I have had my GAU in a personal account for 2 years now. I could not add to it, so I recently opened a holding account. With the new "minimum fee of US$10", that's US$120/year! I don't think I will be adding to my holding account now. That's US$120/yr to say hold one ounce (like the size of a Double-Eagle). Small investors are going to be steering clear of GM. I can see $10/money for a real-time brokerage account, which is what I used to pay to Interactive Brokers, but a $10/month storage fee is excessive. Small investors are going to be saying "sayonara" to GM.

RocketDog

I really, really, really want to know about the regulatory issues. Roy should make a documentary--if/when he ever can. I bet the regulatory push-back would blow our minds. But I'd settle for a letter, a post, or a series of Tweets.
Further, I was thinking last night that the American people really need to start insisting that the financial regulations put in place under the US PATRIOT Act and the Anti-money Laundering and Bank Secrecy Act rules be repealed. President Trump says that his administration has been de-regulating government at a tremendous pace. They should turn their focus to these. They need to focus on repealing these regulations as they pertain to any citizens who are not already suspected of criminal behavior. These acts are destroying our liberty and increasing costs for all sorts of businesses and financial institutions. These acts alone could be preventing Goldmoney from operating as a viable business with the model they originally envisioned. The US PATRIOT Act was put in place as an "emergency measure" right after 9-11. The emergency is over. It should be repealed. I don't care how useful it is to the FBI to "follow the money". They can follow the money of criminals and foreigners all they want, with the proper search warrants, but they should not be following the money of law abiding citizens with no probable cause.
These laws caused my bank to ask me a very odd question a week ago--a questions I should have expected (because I know the rules) when I deposited $10,000 from another bank, into a bank where I have a commercial property loan. They asked me, "What is it for?" I just got annoyed and said, "For it is my money!" Like what the heck bank? Do you not want my deposit? And then I finally just said, "For loan payments." It is times like that, when I realize how tightly the financial net is pulled over us. I should NOT have to answer that question. It is nobody's business.
And most all of us on this board (except GoldKinJang who is clearly a money-laundering criminal, not to mention creepy and annoying) should not have our funds delayed, sequestered and scrutinized by the banks or Goldmoney as we just move it around to our advantage.

GoldNRoll

One thing that I clarified with my relationship manager who was very quick to answer: the fee applies only when metals are stored, it is not a holding/account fee.

At least for now. If one has 0 grams of metal, even if there is a currency balance (funds added), there is no fee. This is good because we can still be here, be active in the community and be ready to buy metals when things go better.

Otherwise, as a gold dealer I offer local safe storage of precious metals through a partner and the minimum storage fee is 120 euros/year (including VAT). I guess this is real cost for storing gold worldwide so when thinking of a modern gold-back banking system, we should consider 3 grams of gold/year to keep a bank account (at current usd/xau ratio, if gold rises it will be less in gold grams).

RocketDog

Thanks for the clarification on the fee and for your perspective @GoldNRoll.
It makes sense that Goldmoney has to change their fee strategy. Originally with the Personal accounts it was $0 for storage, but there were transaction fees and the plan was for us all to be transacting in gold. Now we know there is a regulatory squeeze on the transactions in gold. Goldmoney is changing their strategy to be more of a storage platform and less of a transaction platform. So they have to make money on storage. Roy made a good point that they get stuck spending time on very small accounts which we have seen in this forum when people went crazy because they couldn't get their $20 worth of gold out of their account. It was a lot of money to them, but it costs more than that for a Goldmoney support person to spend an hour or two trying to fix their issues. It will discourage people from holding very small amounts of gold in an account.