Putting clients’ interests first when it comes to gold investments was Sylvia Carrasco’s ambition in 2016. At that time, the CEO of Goldex aimed to found a gold provider that always created value, promoted financial inclusion by opening gold investments to all and protected people’s savings.
Gold is the traditional way to preserve wealth on the long term since it is immune to inflation, financial and banking risks. This precious metal is making constant headlines and its demand is growing strong. According to the World Gold Council, global investment demand for gold has grown at an average of 18% per year since 2000. However, at the time of investing in gold, customers suffer abusive practices.
Unfair gold establishment
The physical gold establishment remains unfair, opaque, old-fashioned. Gold providers are free to manipulate prices, increase spreads and even front run their clients’ orders by mixing their own stock with them. Whereas most investments are regulated, gold is not. In other regulated investments, customers are protected because financial institutions are enforced to always provide the best possible price to their customers.
A short time after Sylvia came up with her business idea, Fernando Ripollés joined the adventure. They soon realised that the only way to put into practice their vision was to set up a company that was different from all others and divert from, what they thought, were unfair industry practices. The co-founders of Goldex wanted to defend clients’ interests and facilitate the buying and selling of gold at the best available prices.
The way to do this is to route all the orders to the world’s largest peer-to-peer gold market. With this unique agency model, Goldex turns out to be the first gold provider that does not own gold and the first ethical player in the market. Through Goldex proprietary technologies, prices are never manipulated or inflated and any chance of market abuse is instantly removed from the equation.
Trading background pedigree
Goldex culture is disrupting the status quo in the last frontier of the FinTech space. Sylvia and Fernando have put all their background at major London investment banks and 1990s electronic trading revolution into Goldex. Their careers cover more than 15 years of pioneering equities algorithmic trading systems.
Sylvia has worked at Credit Suisse and Man Financial and in 2008 she created the first FCA regulated firm to provide execution trading services to institutional global houses. Fernando has worked with successful organizations such as Bloomberg, UBS and Nomura. This experience has made him very keen on searching for and exploring new opportunities in the market. Fernando is also an entrepreneur at heart, as he co-founded a social media network company before coming back to his trading roots.
Along the way, industry leaders and angel investors were enticed by Sylvia and Fernando’s business vision. The co-founders of Goldex have managed to gather an outstanding team of world-leading individuals in finance, payments and technologies, as well as pre-eminent product designers, marketers and IT developers.
They also share the Goldex culture, values and vision. Just to name a few, Deepak Kasthwal, acting CFO of Goldex, founded Ola, one of the world’s most valuable e-commerce companies and Uber’s biggest rival in India; Julian Turnbull, CLCO of Goldex, is a lawyer and an economist, as well as a senior partner at a top 50 legal firm in the UK; Chris Price is the CTO of Goldex and an active supporter of the entrepreneur community in Northern Ireland.
Goldex is still a young company but has a clear understanding of the features and technologies that will make it the preferred choice when investing in physical gold. Hard work is the key to success. Goldex has an innovative spirit to shake things up.