Ernie Blom, president WFDB, said the platform will be developed and upgraded in the coming weeks to adapt it to the needs of bourse members.
“We have invested a lot of money in it. 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,” Blom explained.
He added that the service will be operated by a “fully representative board from a cross-section of the [diamond] industry” and will be free to use, with a fee to be introduced at an unspecified point in the future.
The platform will reportedly have more than 600,000 listings at its launch.
Initially, the service will only be open to members of WFDB-affiliated bourses, though Blom hopes it will be made available to the wider diamond trade in the future. Disputes will be resolved through the WFDB arbitration process.
The plan for a WFDB trading service was first announced in late March, following with a mass withdrawal of goods from the RapNet platform.
More than 600 companies abandoned the service, which is operated by the Rapaport Group, in protest over the 20 March edition of the Rapaport Price List; that List lowered prices 5–9 per cent across most diamond categories.
Shortly after the new prices were published, protesting members created an Instagram account, @stock_off_rapnet, to encourage companies to withdraw their goods from the platform. Within days, it had amassed more than 1,900 followers though has since been deleted.
RapNet members later voted to suspend the List, and Rapaport Group chairman Martin Rapaport has since confirmed future Lists will be published monthly instead of weekly.
Blom said the decision to create a WFDB platform was made following “requests from members who wanted an alternative to what’s out there” and insisted there were no plans to develop a WFDB price list.
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Furore as diamond prices fall; Rapaport Price List suspended