After hundreds of dealers pulled their goods from the RapNet platform, the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) will debut its first online diamond trading exchange [the week of 13 April].
The exchange is based on the Israeli Diamond Institute’s Get Diamonds platform, which the WFDB agreed to purchase for $5,000 on Sunday 5th April. WFDB president Ernie Blom says the group has been overhauling the platform in time for [this] week’s debut.
“We have invested a lot of money in it,” he says. “It will be more user-friendly. It will be upgraded a bit in term of optics. I think you’ll see a lot of changes in the next month or so. [The upgrades] will be an ongoing process.”
The new exchange will be an independent nonprofit entity governed by a board that will include bourse presidents, top manufacturers, and independent experts.
“It will be a fully representative board from a cross section of the industry,” Blom says.
He adds that any profits made from the platform will be plowed back into the industry.
Yoram Dvash, president of the Israel Diamond Exchange, a WFDB-member bourse, says the platform will debut with 622,000 listings—and hopes that number will soon reach 800,000–900,000. He says that some big Indian companies have already agreed to come on board.
The exchange will initially be free, though it does eventually plan to charge members for the service. At first, it will be available only to members of WFDB bourses, but Blom says he hopes to open it up to the wider trade down the line.
Any disputes will be handled by the bourses’ arbitration process. “Arbitration will be a big part of this,” Blom says.
The WFDB initiative came about after hundreds of companies pulled their goods from RapNet, in protest of owner Martin Rapaport’s decision to lower prices in his March 20 price list. RapNet has traditionally been the trade’s dominant online diamond-trading platform.
