Gold isn't really an investment; it's insurance. According to Marleen Evertsz, founder of GoldRepublic, physical gold isn't about quick profits, but about protecting your assets. Masters spoke with her about gold bars, financial awareness, and why more and more people prefer to keep their value outside the financial system.
Physical gold
I was born and raised in Curaçao and moved to the Netherlands at nineteen. After Hotel Management School and a degree in Business Administration, I ended up at Deloitte and later at Optiver, one of the largest fintechs in the world. A fascinating environment, where everything revolves around speed, risk, and technology. I started as a trader and later became managing director of the American branch. I lived in Chicago and managed the office there together with the Head of Trading. While he was responsible for the dealing room, my focus was on everything surrounding it: IT, risk management, compliance, HR. When I left Optiver, I could have gone to work for a competitor. But I had a one-year non-compete clause. I was politely bought out, but so I had to sit on my hands for a while. That turned out to be a decisive year. I had built up assets and started looking for a good asset manager. What I found shocked me. It was 2010, just after the financial crisis. Most asset managers I spoke to had little idea how to assess risk. And I thought: If I think this, with my knowledge of financial markets, what must others experience? People are quicker to give their money to an asset manager than to buy a pair of shoes. Yet they often have no idea what happens to that money afterward. As a society, we haven't grown up with financial awareness. Most people find money complicated, or something they'd rather not think about too much. Yet, it's the very essence of your freedom. During that period, I met someone who sold physical gold. At first, I thought: who buys gold in bars? But when I looked into it, I understood the logic. Gold isn't actually an investment; it's insurance. Protection against currency depreciation. You don't buy physical gold to make a profit, but to store its value, outside of the financial system.
Accessible
I discovered that no bank in the Netherlands sold physical gold anymore. If you wanted to buy gold, you had to open a Swiss bank account. But that was only for people with substantial assets. I found that strange, and also unfair. Why should asset protection be only for the wealthy? That's how the idea for GoldRepublic was born: a platform where everyone can buy, store, and trade physical gold, silver, and platinum. Accessible, transparent, digital. Initially, I wrote the plan for someone else, an entrepreneur with a gold webshop who wanted to scale up. He found it all too complicated. So I decided: I'll do it myself. Six months later, GoldRepublic was online. We launched at the peak of the gold price. In the first month, we made millions. We now manage over €1,1 billion in precious metals for our clients. We have more than 120.000 users and three vault locations: in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Zurich. Two more will be added soon. People literally buy physical bars of gold or silver from us. We buy them directly from the The smelter, which holds them in the vault. The title is transferred digitally, within fractions of a second. That gold never passes our office; it always remains in the vault. The customer truly owns the gold, serial number and all. And that's important, because if you don't know which bar number is yours, you simply don't own any gold. The beauty is that we've made this system accessible. A standard gold bar weighs 12,5 kilos and costs around one and a half million, but with us, you can also become a co-owner of a bar. This way, for a few hundred euros, you can own physical gold, safely stored, with your name attached to it."
Trust
The value of gold remains fascinating. All the gold in the world consists of a single cube measuring 22 by 22 by 22 meters. A little is added every year, but the vast majority is recycled. Necklaces, jewelry, coins—everything goes back to the smelter. Gold has retained its meaning throughout the ages. From the Egyptians to the present: in every civilization, it represents trust. It doesn't corrode, it doesn't disappear, it doesn't decay. In an age when money loses its value, gold is the silent constant. When we started, people still thought it was a bit old-fashioned. 'Physical gold? Act normal.' Meanwhile, the world has changed. Geopolitical tension, inflation, uncertainty—it's driving people to seek stability again. Our client base is therefore diverse: from those over 60 who want to protect their assets to those in their twenties who aren't sure they'll ever have a pension. The younger generation is surprisingly aware. They know that money in the bank loses value. The average interest rate is 1 percent, while inflation is around 3,5 percent. Gold, on the other hand, has yielded an average annual return of 9,25 percent over the past 25 years. But more importantly, it remains valuable, regardless of the system. I'm proud of GoldRepublic's growth, but the truth is: we thrive in uncertain times. Every time a crisis breaks out, I see the phones ringing off the hook. We get hundreds of new accounts every day. That feels ambivalent. Of course, I'm proud that we now protect the assets of tens of thousands of people against inflation. But it doesn't make me happy. why that is necessary.”
Entrepreneurial lesson
My biggest entrepreneurial lesson? There are actually two. The first: never give up too soon. We started at a peak, then the gold price collapsed for years. We could have stopped then, but we kept building. When the market came back, we were in a perfect position. The second lesson: the product is everything. These days, you see many entrepreneurs who start a marketing campaign first and only then figure out what they're actually selling. I don't believe in that. A bad product with good marketing eventually falls through the cracks. We've never been the cheapest, but we are the best in transparency, security, and reliability. That pays off. We now operate in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and soon also in the United Kingdom. I'd love to expand to the US, but that would require a lot of regulation. Nevertheless, I believe we can become the global standard for digital precious metals ownership. At the same time, I want GoldRepublic to remain personal. We still personally call every new customer to welcome them. People find that surprising, but it's precisely what sets us apart: high-tech and high-touch. Sometimes people ask if I'll ever go public with GoldRepublic. Maybe, someday. But honestly, I can't think of a better place to make my money work than in my own business.”