The vault keeper: The man guarding tonnes of gold and silver

In this series, people from all walks of life offer an inside – often unfiltered – take on their livelihoods and what keeps them going in their jobs. In this instalment, hear from a vault manager at The Reserve, Mr Sim Tian Jie, on what it takes to handle precious metals at a large-capacity vault in Singapore, as told to The Straits Times.

I am 43, and I make sure that the gold and silver at The Safe House - the vault facility at The Reserve - are guarded safely and accounted for. The facility in Changi has a maximum capacity of around 10,000 tonnes.

People often think that working with gold and silver is all glitter, but it’s a very laborious job. Half of my job involves hand-carrying the precious metals, and the other half comprises administrative work to ensure the metals are properly documented. I also handle customer inquiries.

It’s important to keep fit, as the physical handling of precious metals, primarily gold and silver, can be strenuous work. I could be carrying a 30kg block of silver at any one time. We can process a couple of tonnes of metal a day.

When I reach the office in the morning, the first thing I do is to check the e-mails for inquiries. Major trading in precious metals typically occurs in US and Europe timings, so inquiries from clients will come in through the night. Most of our clients are based overseas.

They ask: “How can I ship my precious metals here? How much does it cost to store them here? How safe is the vault and what’s our safety protocols?”

They also ask what happens if we, the employees, steal their metals. I will tell them that most of us are long-time employees, and the core team has been here for more than eight years.

We started out with three vault managers, and there are six of us now. I have been here for 13 years, and some of us are shareholders of the company so it’s in our interest to make sure everything goes well. One of the things we look for in hiring is that the person has to be very trustworthy. A small act of theft will break that trust.

People who invest in precious metals are typically more financially sophisticated because they know what's going on in the world, and they want to invest to hedge and protect their assets.

They want to diversify their risk from their home country to other places. Some even want to ship the precious metals here. Singapore is called the Switzerland of Asia for good reason, and many people want to park their assets here. It is known to be a very safe and politically stable country. We are also in a safe geographical location.

The heaviest gold bar here, a standard in the industry, weighs about 12.5kg, with an estimated worth of $2.2 million. In comparison, the heaviest silver bar weighs 30kg.

Gold is stored in a Class 2 high-security vault, which means that with any kind of cutting or drilling tool, it would take an hour to break in.

Because the range of gold sizes is smaller and easier to transport, gold is more vulnerable to theft. Therefore, the Class 2 vault is placed inside a Class 1 vault, adding another 30 minutes to the break-in time.

In total, it would take 1½ hours with the right tools to access the gold vault.

The silver vault is a Class 1 vault, as it’s very difficult to steal a piece of 30kg silver.

We are also near Changi Airport, making it a highly secure area. Inside the building, we have our own security officers to take care of the perimeter. We have more than 300 CCTV cameras, seismic detectors and laser sensors.

For someone to try breaking in - like in a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie - one has to go through many different layers of security before getting into the building itself.

When we bring clients into a vault, they have to be escorted by two employees.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, our overseas clients couldn’t fly in to visit us, and they wanted assurance that their assets were still being held here and not elsewhere.

Instead of a physical tour, we held a video conference with the clients to show them where their assets were.

I was in the Singapore navy for eight years before joining a company with functions similar to The Safe House.

I stayed there for two years before stumbling upon this secured logistics job at The Safe House by accident. In the beginning, I thought it was a normal warehousing job, but the longer I worked here, the more I realised it was so much more than that.

In this job, I need to know a lot more about finance, economics, geography, history, as well as a little bit of politics.

This is because clients come to us with many questions, including some I would never have imagined. I have to assure them that parking their assets in Singapore is one of the safest decisions they can make.

They know about Singapore, but they do not necessarily understand Singapore. Sometimes, they ask: “What happens if there are earthquakes or tsunamis? What happens if Singapore goes underwater?”

But we do have insurance that covers fire, internal or external theft and mysterious disappearance.

This industry is very niche, so a lot of things are self-taught and learnt on the job.

To do well here, one must be very meticulous, because we are handling clients’ assets.

Any mistake we make could lead to losses of a couple of million dollars. One must also be street smart and be able to handle any client inquiries.

Our approach is slightly different from other vaulting facilities because we open our doors and invite clients to visit us and have a look around. Some of them become friends along the way. Then they will share certain information with us.

I wouldn’t call it financial advice, but as I started connecting the dots with happenings around the world, I thought: Am I missing out on something? That’s how I got very interested in precious metals.

My job scope has also widened - now we are attracting more institutional clients like family offices, asset management companies and banks.

I can’t tell you where exactly my precious metals are in this facility, but I do store some of my assets here.

I started investing in precious metals about eight years ago. I got to know the director of The Safe House while I was at my previous company, and he gifted me a silver dragon coin.

I appreciated it, kept it and labelled it as my first silver investment in my portfolio.

Personally, I look at silver more because of the gold-silver ratio.

With one ounce of gold, how much silver can I buy? At today's prices, one ounce of gold can buy you about 90 ounces of silver.

The ratio is still very high. When this ratio falls in time, say, when one ounce of gold can afford only 40 ounces of silver, that is when I would switch and sell my silver to convert to gold.

So when the ratio is low, you convert to gold, and if the ratio is high, you convert back to silver. This way, even without purchasing additional metals, your metals holding will grow over the years.

In China, back in the olden days, we used silver and gold as money. In fact, the word “bank” in Chinese is called ying hang, which literally means silver row.

So, traditionally, silver was used as a store of value, but over the course of history, people have forgotten that it is one of the main investment vehicles.

Silver is mainly used for industrial purposes, especially in things like laptops, mobile phones and solar panels. And the price of silver has been suppressed since it peaked in 2011 at US$49.

It's just that silver prices have shot up over the past weeks, and suddenly people are taking notice of it. Throughout the course of my career here, I have been telling people that silver is a good investment. It’s what I call the poor man's gold.

When I started buying silver, one ounce, or about 31g, cost about $30. Right now, the price is about $70. This metal has a lot of potential.

A fake gold bar can look exactly like a real one. One of the easier ways to check its authenticity is by using a magnet. Gold and silver, in particular, have the unique characteristic of repelling magnets.

We devised a very simple machine in-house by placing a magnet on a weighing scale. Then we’ll put the metal close to that magnet on the scale, and if it shows a positive value it means the magnet is being pushed down, so the metal’s real.

When we receive the metal, we will also conduct non-destructive tests in our lab to check if it’s real and the purity level before storage. Not all storage facilities do testing of precious metals.

We have been doing these tests for 12 years and we’ve not encountered a fake, so that’s very reassuring. But we do encounter metals that do not meet the 99.99 purity standard, for example.

Say if you have 100kg of gold, you can easily sell the metals to our company - a service we provide - without needing to arrange for transport.

For those who need quick cash flow without selling their metals, they can pledge them for a loan. For example, if a piece of silver costs $50,000, one can take a loan of $25,000 at a low interest rate.

As the metal has been tested before storage, we don’t have to worry about whether it is fake or its purity level.

The most memorable part of my career here was the big move from our old location in 2024. Before moving to this Changi facility, we were storing our metals at a 10,000 sq ft rental storage facility in Bedok.

For about two weeks, everyone in the company, including the founder himself, was just in T-shirts and jeans, pushing crate after crate of precious metals.

When there are geopolitical tensions - such as during 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests - precious metal usually shines, and many clients start shipping theirs to us. That was when we realised we didn’t have enough space and started looking into buying our own building.

We didn’t want the new vault to be a typical warehouse, we wanted it to be an entirely different experience for the client. It has stylish, modern elements that make the overall environment more inviting and posh. There are seating areas, and even a barista bar for clients and visitors to have a drink.

The new 180,000 sq ft facility is also a display of confidence - we want to show our clients that we are here to stay and will not run away with their assets.

Our storage capacity has increased tremendously in recent years - from about 30 tonnes of metals to about 700 tonnes over the course of 13 years. Of course, the value of precious metals has also gone up in recent years. At the silver vault, we use pallet stackers that can go up to 12m high.

Because silver is bulkier, it requires much more space than gold. That's why we built the vault storage for silver before gold. For the gold vault, we can store up to 60 tonnes of metals.

There's a huge influx of locals rushing to buy precious metals. We’ve also received inquiries from a number of local people wanting to move their precious metals from their homes to somewhere safer and enjoy the other services we offer, such as testing or pledging metals for a loan.

The minimum denomination to store one’s assets at The Safe House is a 50g gold bar, which currently costs about $8,000.

We do have clients who store older coins, like Soviet ones dating back to the 1910s. These are some of the unusual coins we have encountered that we don’t really see in the common market.

Interacting with clients is my favourite part of the job because it gives me insights into what people from all walks of life think. This makes things interesting, because each one of them has a different perspective.

The challenge is to always upkeep the standards in making sure every metal is stored properly and accounted for. The volume of metals we handle is increasing - and the more we store, the more mistakes we might make.

Generally, I don’t talk much about my job to friends and family because I am working in a highly secure area. But they do ask me about what it’s like to work here.

I would say that it’s nothing too fanciful, but I find great satisfaction in knowing that we are safekeeping these assets for our clients.

Got an interesting job to share? Write in to us at ssharon@sph.com.sg.