By David Brough
Fintech company UNI Diamonds, in partnership with IDEX, plans to launch a transparent price guide for white natural polished diamonds by the end of September, with the support of more than 90 companies delivering live prices into UNI’s platform and hundreds more into IDEX’s website.
The launch of the platform, which uses state-of-the-art data technology, was in response to calls for a transparent polished diamond pricing guide for the global industry, UNI Diamonds executives said.
“The key for us was to deliver what can explain what is going on in the industry – just by numbers,” UNI Diamonds CEO Mahiar Borhanjoo told Jewellery Outlook in a video call interview. “What is important is the price transparency.”
The price guide will be launched on www.naturaldiamondprices.com and www.naturaldiamondprices.org by the end of September, said Alexander Zaidelson, chief data and product officer.
For the first six months, the price guide will be available free to the global trade, and then will be offered on a subscription basis.
The price guide provides up-to-date wholesale market prices guidance.
It is expected that dealers in due course will offer stones at discounts to the price guide, Borhanjoo said.
The specifications will encompass white polished diamonds from 30-pointers to 5 carats; D to M colours; and flawless to I2 clarities.
UNI Diamonds has applied for membership of CIBJO-World Jewellery Confederation and the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC).
The initial release of the Price Guide is based on data from three sources:
2. IDEX with $4B of pricing data and sales information from their platform
3. Searches and diamond pricing data collected from the market
To create the guide, UNI developed an algorithm that collates data from multiple sources, detects and eliminates outliers, and provides average market prices in real-time.
UNI Diamonds’ price guide is audited by an independent company using the latest technologies that keep pricing confidential and protect contributors of pricing data.
“We are protecting the participants’ privacy,” Zaidelson said.
In order to ensure maximum transparency and data accuracy, all contributors to the price guide must be assured that their proprietary information will remain confidential.
To meet this privacy requirement, UNI partnered with QEDIT, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and a leading provider of Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) solutions.
QEDIT is a secure data collaboration platform, powered by advanced cryptography, enabling calculations on encrypted data without storing or accessing sensitive, raw information.
Looking ahead, additional data sourced from other rigorously vetted platforms will be aggregated into the price guide, broadening its scope considerably.
“All companies that have price guidance reports that are open and transparent are welcome to incorporate their data onto this platform, to be active partners in the first guidance which is transparent and open to validation,” Mahiar Borhanjoo said.
“This is about our diamonds and our industry. We should all have a say in our diamond guidance and how it is formed.”
