Dirk Steinhoff: New Leadership, New Chapter for BFI Bullion

At the start of the year, Dirk Steinhoff, the former Chief Investment Officer of our sister company, BFI Infinity, joined us at BFI Bullion as our new Chief Executive Officer. Dirk has served on the BFI Group’s leadership team for more than 18 years and we are very excited to have his economic, geopolitical, and strategic expertise and his hands-on experience at the helm of our company.

This article was taken from BFI Bullion’s recent newsletter, the Digger. To read the latest Digger in its entirety, click here.

In the following conversation, he shares his vision for BFI Bullion’s next chapter and his plans to build upon our core values.

You spent nearly two decades as CIO of BFI Infinity, with a strong focus on asset management and portfolio construction. What prompted your transition to leading the Group’s physical bullion business, and how does your “CIO lens” influence the way you manage a precious metals company today?

It’s a transition that feels very natural to me, because I’m not really moving to a new company - I’m coming home. I have been part of the BFI Capital Group since 2007. Our precious metals activities were originally established within the asset management business and later spun off as a stand-alone company, initially named Global Gold. This means I was deeply involved in starting, running, and eventually separating the precious metals business. In many ways, I have known this company since it was a baby.

That said, much has changed since then; internally too but especially in the external environment. We now live in an entirely different world, and in today’s landscape, physical precious metals are arguably more important than ever.

What triggered the move was that the timing felt right. At BFI Infinity, we had built an outstanding team of experienced and battle-tested professionals and implemented all the necessary tools and processes, allowing the operation to run smoothly without my daily involvement. Equally important was the recent launch of Primorum by BFI Bullion. I consider Primorum a truly unique proposition: the first and only offering of its kind in the global precious metals industry. I strongly believe in this new precious metals integrity standard and I am genuinely excited by its potential. It is an honor to lead the team that will establish it as the industry benchmark.

As for my “CIO lens,” I believe it will be highly valuable in this new role. It allows me to view gold and precious metals not merely as commodities to be traded, but as a vital risk management tool within a broader portfolio context. Having actively managed precious metals allocations for nearly two decades, I am intimately familiar with all the arguments both for and against them. Additionally, my experience as CIO gives me a strong understanding of the interconnected operational aspects, such as IT systems, banking relationships, custody solutions, and reporting requirements. This perspective is now helping me significantly strengthen our services, with a clear focus on enhancing our B2B offering without giving up our existing business.

Having managed complex global portfolios at BFI Infinity, what is the most significant psychological or operational difference you see in how investors approach "paper" wealth versus the physical ownership of gold?

There is a notable psychological difference between the two approaches. When managing paper assets, investors are essentially relying on promises made by counterparties, be it banks, brokers, or other financial institutions, to fulfill their obligations. These solutions generally work well in normal market conditions and continue to play an important role for many clients. At BFI Infinity, we provide access to physical precious metals through exchange-traded securities backed by allocated gold and silver. These instruments offer convenient and efficient exposure within a diversified portfolio.

In contrast, direct physical bullion ownership, as offered by BFI Bullion, completely eliminates counterparty risk. Many clients tell us that the moment they hold a physical bar in their hands or see their metals securely stored in a segregated Swiss vault outside the banking system, a genuine sense of calm and ownership emerges. It provides a unique form of peace of mind that a bank statement simply cannot replicate.

This is not to say that precious metals exposure within the banking system no longer has its place - it certainly does. Both approaches serve different client needs and can comfortably coexist, depending on individual objectives and preferences.

Your academic background is in Civil Engineering and Business Administration. Does this “engineering mindset” influence the way you approach the operational side of the precious metals business?

My academic background fundamentally shapes how I view the gold industry. In engineering, an unstable foundation or compromised structural integrity places the entire edifice at risk, regardless of how impressive the façade may appear. I apply the same principle to our business, particularly across trading, custody, and logistics. When we speak about our services, and especially about Primorum, we are ultimately speaking about structural integrity. Verified quality, embedded integrity, and assured liquidity of our clients’ metals are therefore not features, but necessities. A single point of failure in the custody chain, such as commingled storage or opaque reporting, can undermine the integrity of the entire structure.

Another discipline I carried over from engineering is an uncompromising attention to detail. I have always believed it is far more effective to invest the necessary time upfront to build something correctly, refine it, test it thoroughly, and challenge its underlying assumptions, than to accelerate the process and address deficiencies later. This mindset has guided my work throughout my career at BFI and continues to directly inform how we design and operate our platform.

Can you tell us a bit more about the Primorum standard? What makes it so unique in your view?

Primorum came out of a very simple observation: there is a structural weakness in how physical bullion ownership has traditionally worked. For decades, the precious metals market has largely relied on trust (paper certificates, assurances about origin and custody), while investors rarely have real visibility into what actually happens behind the scenes. In a typical retail setup, gold often comes from the secondary market. Those bars may have changed hands many times, been stored under unclear conditions, and are usually accompanied by documentation that offers only limited certainty. There are plenty of documented cases where certificates turned out to be unreliable or forged, and as technology has advanced, those risks have only grown.

With Primorum, we wanted to turn that logic around. The idea was to replace trust with confidence, based on objective and verifiable evidence of provenance, authenticity, and quality. It starts with sourcing. Primorum bars are exclusively sourced directly from leading LBMA-certified Swiss refiners such as Argor-Heraeus and Valcambi. By excluding the secondary market entirely, we remove what I often call the “secondary market fog.”

From the moment a bar is produced, it moves straight into high security Swiss vaults, without ever entering the wider stream of commerce. Each bar is fully allocated, individually identifiable, and supported by continuous documentation throughout the entire custody chain. For investors, this means two things. First, absolute clarity about what they own. And second, liquidity by design. Primorum products are embedded in a predefined buyback framework, which allows for reliable resale whenever needed, making liquidity an integral part of the ownership experience, not an afterthought.

As you mentioned before, this is a very different world we live in today, and indeed, we are seeing a significant shift toward a multi-polar global order with a lot of new risks and challenges. In your view, has gold’s role transitioned from a "tactical hedge" to a "core anchor”, especially for the individual investor?

What we’re going through right now is something I’d describe as the Great Transition. The unipolar, dollar-centric world we’ve known for decades is slowly but clearly coming to an end. Power is shifting, the global order is becoming more fragmented, and unexpected developments - especially on the geopolitical side - are happening more frequently.

In this new multipolar landscape, gold is starting to regain its role as the ultimate monetary anchor. We can already see this very clearly in the behavior of central banks. They’ve been buying gold at record levels, and they’ve been doing so consistently for years. In practical terms, they’re building a backup to the fiat money system. And while official statements still emphasize confidence in their currencies, their actions tell a different story.

For private investors, the takeaway isn’t very different. If central banks feel the need for a backup, then individuals should too. Gold is no longer just a tactical hedge against inflation, war, or the latest crisis - something you trade in and out of depending on the headlines. It’s increasingly moving back into its historical role as a core monetary asset. In that sense, gold is a bit like Switzerland itself. In a world where geopolitics increasingly influence currencies, markets, and even entire asset classes, gold remains one of the few truly neutral assets. And that neutrality is exactly what makes it so valuable in the environment we’re living in today.

Read the entire BFI Bullion Digger here.