Summary:
You can keep gold at a special secured facility in Changi, where a firm lets big and small investors trade in actual gold in an online global exchange. Mr Victor Foo, founding chief executive of Singapore Precious Metal Exchange shows how they tests gold and silver bars.
Transcript:
Today, I would like to demonstrate how when our customers come to view their bullion, how we are able to verify to show them what you’re holding is the real thing. We basically have three steps, and I’m going to show you today.
The first is we basically take the dimensions of the bar and we weighed with a very sensitive 3 decimal weighing machine. So this is a kilo bar and you can see that the weight is exactly to 1 kilo, not a gram more or a gram less.
The next method of testing is we basically use an ultrasound machine to test the the bar in terms of purity. You can see as I move the bar into different parts of the bar, it basically shows that the readings are within the green area band so this to ensure that there’s no adulteration or this bar is not a tungsten or with any impurities inside.
The third will be basically using a spectrometer where we will scan the surface of the bar and show you the composite of the metals between those bars. And you can see here it is basically an AU 99.9.
As a test to ensure that this spectrometer is well-calibrated, we can even show you to demonstrate as I scan the Singapore $1.00 coin, it will also then show you the composite of the coin. I also have some silver bars here today where we can also scan the bars and it should show AG 999.
Source: The Straits Times, November 17, 2020