Q&A with Miranda Werstiuk, Chief Revenue Officer, Monetary Metals
Chief Revenue Officer Miranda Werstiuk explains how Monetary Metals connects investors with mining companies, refiners, and jewellers, highlighting the platform’s disruptive model, strict risk controls, and vision to make gold financing mainstream.
To listen to the interview, click here:
Can you give us an introduction to your experience in the industry, Monetary Metals, and the company’s ultimate goals?
I’m a 30-plus-year veteran of resource finance, starting my career in metals and mining at a private investment bank in Toronto, Canada, and then moving into the gold and silver lending space with a French-based group.
I moved to Monetary Metals in November 2023, where I lead the origination team and serve as chief revenue officer. I’m responsible for bringing in the deal flow that allows our investors to put their metal to work.
Monetary Metals is a unique, globally disruptive platform and marketplace.
Gold has historically been viewed as a store of wealth. We’re now asking how you can productively put that metal, and silver, to work.
Traditionally, you’d have gold bars or coins, put them in a vault, and assume there’s going to be a consistent price increase over the period that you hold that metal.
What Monetary Metals has done, and this is through the vision of our founder and CEO, Keith Weiner, is to turn that metal into a productive asset.
The whole thesis around Monetary Metals is a yield on gold, paid in gold. We connect investors in our marketplace who have metal on account with us, and we put that metal to work, allowing those investors to earn a yield on their metal.
We have two financing silos and structures that we work through, but we are the only platform like this in the market.
We have an incredible team that our CEO Keith has continued to build, adding like-minded, aligned individuals and bringing them into this space to execute on that vision: yield on gold, paid in gold, allowing investors with physical metal to turn that metal into a productive asset.
What does this mean in practice to put gold to work?
Since the company was founded in 2012, we have created two financing silos. The first involves providing leases of metal to users of metal, like jewellers, bullion dealers, coin dealers, refineries, mills, and so on.
We also create metal-denominated loans with gold and silver, which are provided to producers of metal or anyone who generates significant revenue from metal production, like mining companies or recyclers. We create a structure whereby we lend metal to those counterparties, and the loan is repaid in ounces, with any interest or fees also paid in ounces.
Everything we do is denominated in ounces, particularly on the leasing side. Our investors retain the title to that metal.
So why would companies be borrowing the gold rather than buying it outright?
When you purchase metal, that requires cash on hand. Any counterparty looking to grow their business typically uses cash to buy metal and then puts that metal to work.
In our structure, particularly for metal producers, the funding aligns directly with what sits on your balance sheet. If you produce ounces of gold or silver, we lend you ounces of gold or silver. It’s a cleaner, more natural match between production and financing.
For downstream users such as jewellers, refiners, or mints, this structure allows them to unlock the value of inventory they already hold.
The structure that we use is a simultaneous swap transaction. If you hold 10kg of metal and enter into a lease arrangement with us, our loan-to-value allows you to unlock the equivalent of nearly 20kg of working-capital metal. That capital can be deployed directly into the business.
It sits off the balance sheet for the counterparty, so it isn’t recorded as a liability, and it allows businesses to grow efficiently. This is supported by our strict underwriting process, where we intake, do triage, conduct due diligence, and underwrite. We have a very specific and detailed process that supports the ethos of the company.
Our raison d’être, our ‘Hippocratic Oath for Gold’, is that we strive to not lose investor gold. That really drives the nexus of the business. Our investors are trusting us with their metal, and it is our responsibility to put that metal to work appropriately and conduct sound due diligence. We need to ensure these are solid transactions where a customer’s metal can be deployed to earn a yield on that metal, paid in metal.
How do you derisk that lending process?
On the mining side, if you’re providing a gold or silver loan under our bond structure, there are standard security and collateral covenants in place. That typically includes general security agreements, title over key assets, and appropriate coverage on the asset base.
That all comes together as the security package for our lending structure.
On the leasing side, we have a bailment structure where our investors retain title to that metal throughout the process. They never lose ownership, so that’s the first level of protection.
We have multiple layers of risk mitigation through our due diligence, daily reporting, and monitoring once the lease has been executed.
We sync up all the reporting from the counterparty, and that is monitored. All the information and data on where our gold sits is tracked daily. That’s quite a heavy operational lift, but it’s because it’s our investors’ gold. These processes have been put in place over the growth and evolution of Monetary Metals.
On the jewellery side, we use radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking, which tags each item and specific piece of jewellery. We recently completed an acquisition of TJS USA, which is a global leader in asset assurance. Especially in the jewellery space, we have built a tier-one asset assurance provider into our company and ecosystem, providing daily monitoring. This means the assets are safe, and we have visibility on them at all times.
What are some of the key takeaways you’ve learned about the gold market and behaviours around the metal based on your work?
I started over 30 years ago in the mining banking space, raising equity for rough-and-tumble Canadian juniors. I’ve lived through and seen many commodity cycles, through boom and bust, so when I started on this path in the metals and mining space, gold and silver to me were just commodities you pulled out of the ground.
In my initial career, the focus was to fund these companies through equity or debt so that they could pull metal out of the ground.
When I moved through my career and eventually to Monetary Metals, it was really about a shift in seeing gold as a productive asset and seeing how we can allow investors with physical metal to have a yield on their metal.
Gold is money, right? Gold is fungible, and so there’s an opportunity to put that gold to work. It doesn’t mean that you always have to go out and do an equity finance or raise debt. It’s similar to fiat-denominated structures, so why not take that metal and put it to work?
We’ve done over 80 transactions to date. Monetary Metals is a trailblazer. We’ve created a new, disruptive space in metal finance.
My grandparents had gold coins hidden in their basement. Our company allows that metal to be put to work and become a productive, yield-bearing asset, rather than simply anticipating some accretive delta between when I buy the metal and when I sell it.
Do you see this as a new type of asset class for the financial industry?
Yes, absolutely. Our CEO Keith had this vision of a gold yield marketplace and has brought a team together to execute that and continue to drive the business forward. It definitely is a new way of doing business.
Gold and silver loans are a known structure within the mining sector. But we’ve taken that one step further by using metal that our investors have and putting it to work.
We could do a gold loan with proprietary capital or cash that buys metal and moves it through the chain. We can send physical metal to our counterparties, and this is a shift in the way companies can fund themselves.
We’ve seen record highs in gold over the past year. How does an exciting gold market impact the way you’re doing business?
I would say that the investors are actually price agnostic to a certain degree because they have the physical metal and just want to get a yield on it in ounces. It’s this constant flow of ounces being put to work, with yield coming back.
The commodity cycle and prices will always go up and down, but fundamentally, for our investors, it’s all about the physical metal. It’s all about the ounces of metal, how you put that to work, and what kind of yield you can get on it.
I keep going back to this, but gold and silver can be productive, yield-bearing assets, as opposed to fiat-based structures. How do you add to your portfolio? What does that look like as an investor? Gold and silver should be an integral part of that.
Monetary Metals is already well established in its own right, but looking ahead, what does success look like for the company and your impact on the gold industry overall?
We want to see that shift from gold sitting in a vault as a potential hedge to being productive. We want to see gold-denominated financing becoming mainstream.
Monetary Metals is blazing a trail in this space, and we are focused on being a transformative way for companies to get funding.
Write to Amy Rotman at Mining.com.au
Images: Mining.com.au
