As tokenisation reshapes finance, fractional gold ownership is expanding access to hard assets once limited to institutions and wealthy investors.
For most people, owning hard assets like gold has meant going through institutions. Mamadou Kwidjim Toure has spent his career building the infrastructure to change that. In this interview with the Founder and CEO of Ubuntu Tribe, who structured more than $25 billion in transactions across African and global markets at KPMG, BNP Paribas, and IBM, we discuss capital access, ownership, and what genuine financial inclusion would require.
For a long time, gold has felt like something only a few people can easily access. What do you think is changing about that today?
Gold tends to perform best when trust in fiat is thin. Central banks have been buying at near-record levels over the last two years, so much so that the price of gold surpassed $5K per ounce for the first time in 2026. But for most retail investors, the entry point is still at thousands of dollars per bar, which keeps them outside the very hedge institutions are using to protect themselves.
Tokenised gold grew from $1.3 billion at the end of 2024 to over $5 billion in early 2026, which is access catching up to demand that had been there for years.
The change has come from new infrastructure. Gold can now be broken into fractions small enough to start at ten cents, held in regulated vaults, and backed one-to-one, with storage and compliance handled at the platform level. In Europe, MiCA puts that infrastructure on the same regulatory footing as the rest of institutional finance.
And you can see that change in the data: tokenised gold grew from $1.3 billion at the end of 2024 to over $5 billion in early 2026, which is access catching up to demand that had been there for years.
What first made you think the way people access and save in gold needed to be rethought?
It came out of twenty years in institutional finance. At KPMG, BNP Paribas, and IBM, I worked on deals where gold and similar hard assets were standard treasury tools. None of them were ever built for retail, because the entire architecture assumed large balance sheets and cost structures that only work at an institutional scale.
The gap became impossible to ignore during currency stress cycles. Each time trust in fiat slipped, institutional capital moved into gold while retail savers watched the same chart with no instrument that worked at their size.
Mobile money showed the answer was structural. It leapfrogged the banking system across Africa, bringing hundreds of millions into the financial system without a bank account, and the parallel to gold was obvious. If a household could move money on a $50 phone, the same infrastructure should have given them fractional access to gold.
As CEO and Founder of Ubuntu Tribe, how have your conversations with everyday users shaped the way you think about ownership and what it should feel like?
The first questions are almost always about trust. People want to know where the gold is, who holds it, and what happens to their position if the platform fails. Price action comes later, if at all.
That shaped how we built the system. Anyone can verify in real time that the gold backing their holding sits in the vault, with LBMA-certified custody and independent audits underneath. It gives retail the same standard of trust institutions have always had.
Simplicity is the other constant. People will not learn a financial dialect to save their own money. They want plain language, a unit they understand, and the ability to redeem whenever they choose. Ownership should be as direct as holding a coin, without the storage problem.
Why do you think something as trusted and familiar as gold has still felt out of reach for so many people?
The infrastructure that fits the scale of everyday savings just did not exist until recently.
Gold’s barrier has always been its physical nature. The cost of physical custody only makes economic sense above a certain holding size, which has historically priced out anyone working with smaller amounts.
ETFs reduced some of that friction, but they still operate within brokerage systems that assume account sizes and transaction patterns out of sync with small, recurring savings.
The demand has always been there. The infrastructure that fits the scale of everyday savings just did not exist until recently.
When you speak to people about new ways of saving and investing, what reactions do you usually get, and what surprises you the most?
The first reaction is almost always skepticism, and it should be. People want to know how this differs from the products that over-promised and collapsed before. That conversation usually turns once we show them how the reserves are verified and where the gold is held.
They take that verification more seriously than I expected. In traditional finance, retail almost never checks what backs a product. Here, the same person who never asked a bank to prove a deposit balance will check the reserves behind their own gold.
The second surprise is behavioural. Most treat this as savings, buying small amounts on a regular schedule and holding for the long term. That is closer to how a household uses a safe than how a trader uses an account.
What do you think needs to change for global financial systems to feel truly open and fair to everyone?
The biggest issue is information. In traditional finance, institutional clients have a constant view of what they own and where it sits in the legal chain. Retail customers usually do not, because they get summary statements every quarter while the workings are handled by middlemen who report on their own schedule.
But that is starting to change. With tokenisation, a retail user can check their position against the reserves at any time, just as institutions check their holdings. The shift is about more than lower costs, since retail can now see what institutions have always been able to see.
For the system to feel open and fair, that same idea has to spread past tokenised commodities. Banking, lending, insurance and pensions still have the same information gap. Once users experience real-time verification on one product, they will stop accepting opacity on the rest.
If you could define what real financial inclusion means in one simple sentence, how would you put it?
It’s simple: you know the system is inclusive when the rules don’t change with the size of the cheque.
Executive Profile
Mamadou Kwidjim Toure is CEO & Founder of Ubuntu Tribe. He spent over 20 years at major institutions like KPMG, BNP Paribas, and IBM, where he managed transactions worth over $25 billion across African infrastructure, mining, and technology. As a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Mamadou advocates for using technology to drive sustainable prosperity in emerging markets.
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