The Future of Ethical and Responsible Diamond Trading

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At Pala Diamonds we believe the diamond industry is built on trust. You trust us to provide you with real, ethically sourced, high-quality diamonds. We back up that trust by going above and beyond in our processing, testing and guarantees, giving you absolute transparency in your investment with us.

Supporting accountability in the diamond industry.

To us, diamonds are a precious commodity. As with all industries dealing with high-value items, there needs to be accountability at every stage of the trading chain, assuring clients that your investment is fair and responsible.

That’s why we provide transparency at every stage of our business and product specifications. We want to provide you with ethically sourced diamonds and a service you can trust implicitly. Historically, there has been no simple, single way to do this – but that has not stopped us looking for one. Pala Diamonds has built strong relationships within the industry and adopted market-leading technology, to add social, supply chain and clinical accountability to our product at every level.

Deal with people you can trust.

 Over the last two decades there have been significant strides in accountability across the industry. This has been in part due to the widespread media interest in blood diamonds and the adoption of the Kimberley process.

We believe that the industry is now at a tipping point where we can replace guarantees with certainty, thanks to the development of mechanisms such as blockchain technology, advanced information sharing that allows us to track the path of an individual mine from diamonds through to jewellery retail, verified by mathematical precision.

 Pala Diamonds not only embraces developments in technology, we want to lead the way in standards of best practice. Our membership of the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) is a vital part of that.

What this means for our clients is this; by trading with us, you are confident that:

  1. We are at the forefront of setting and maintaining standards of best practice.
  2. We embrace technology, screening 100% of our diamonds against undisclosed synthetics.
  3. We are embracing blockchain technology to monitor our supply chain for bad actors.

We take our responsibility to protect your reputation seriously.

 Pala Diamonds – our commitment to you

  1. We are at the forefront of setting and maintaining standards of best practice.

Pala Diamonds is the 1st UK-based diamond trading company certified by the RJC. This means that we are inspected against the RJC Code of Practice and RJC Code of Conduct, to ensure we are ethical actors within our industry

While the nature of the diamond industry attracts dishonest parties, our affiliation with the RJC means you can be sure we respect human rights, labour rights and support ethical mining practices. We consider the environmental impact of our business and our partners and offer full product disclosure to whoever we deal with.

 Since our first accreditation in 2013, we have gone on to gain three more. We have chosen to pursue these because we feel the RJC are foremost in international standards organisations and participating in their guidelines helps us remain ethical and accountable. We use their framework to inform our day-to-day operations for sourcing and trading diamonds; this means our trading adheres to strict anti-corruption and anti-money laundering standards throughout the supply chain.

Our latest RJC certification:

For more information on the members of the RJC, its certification and standards, please visit the official website.

You can also find our page on the RJC website here.

Some aspects of the RJC implemented standards at Pala Diamond Co.:

  • We conduct full KYS (Know Your Supplier) checks on all of our current and prospective supplier factories we work with.
  • We ensure all of our suppliers are RJC certificated and adhere to the Kimberley Process Protocol.
  • All of our significant suppliers have declared, in writing, that they are committed to conducting their business in a culture of honesty, transparency and opposition to fraud and corruption.
  • We will only procure diamonds that are guaranteed by the Kimberley Process.
  • Annual risk assessments taken to ensure our diamonds are not sourced from suppliers who may have operations or sourcing via CAHRA’s. This is guaranteed by statements and our own due diligence.
  • All staff are trained on how to conduct all of the above, ensuring that the ethos and understanding of due diligence and accountability is embedded within all corners of our Company.
  • Traceability – we are proud to be leading the way with traceability solutions for the diamond sector via the use of geographical location tagging and blockchain technologies along our supply chain.

  1. We embrace technology, screening 100% of our diamonds against undisclosed synthetics.

We thoroughly verify our suppliers and we inspect the documentation for every batch of stones that we trade. But we also believe that our guarantee should be personal.

We examine 100% of the stones that pass through our sorting office to identify any undisclosed synthetics. This means we can guarantee that the product you receive is a legitimate, genuine, natural diamond.

We do this because we believe that if you are buying a natural diamond, that’s what you should get. Real diamonds are a luxury product, and we want to uphold their reputation. Our guarantee of authenticity ensures that you’ll get a product that pleases your customers and retains its value.

We use state-of-the-art technology from De Beers, De Beers SynthDetectTM and De Beers AMS2, and our machines are calibrated monthly to ensure the accuracy of results.

De Beers AMS2

The De Beers AMS2 is an automated melee screening machine for near-colourless to colourless that can screen as many as 3,600 diamonds per hour. Near-colourless to colourless melee are one of our most requested products. The AMS2 is uniquely fast and allows us to screen 100% of our stock, so we can offer you a cast-iron guarantee that the goods you receive from us are genuine. 

De Beers SynthDetect

A small percentage of stones require further, specialist inspection, and we rely on the SynthDetect to do this. We have incredible confidence and extensive experience in the use of this machine so we can confidently classify even the most obscure stones.

This is how we offer a trusted service that sets us apart from our competitors. To find out more about our diamond screening and verification  

  1. We are embracing blockchain technology to monitor our supply chain for bad actors

While we stand by our guarantees, we know that there is something even better than trust … complete verification.

Ever since the design of the round brilliant, people have been trying to apply mathematics to diamonds. Now it seems that mathematics and blockchain technology will revolutionise the industry with  a unique way to trace the diamond supply chain from source to showroom

So, how will it work? Cryptocurrency such as bitcoin relies on cryptography and the idea that it is possible to create a message that can only be deciphered with the correct key, allowing for a perfectly secure communication channel between two parties who share the same key information. The same principle can be used to verify information about physical goods beyond all doubt, as secure product characteristics shared between two parties will either match or they will not.

Thanks to the beautiful mathematics behind the process, no hacker can exploit the information, and no supercomputer can use brute force to decrypt it. Therefore, using this method, we can provide provenance guarantees of your diamonds, right back to the source country, tracking its journey through the world.

What this technology provides:

  • Privacy – vital information is only available to legitimate people.
  • Documented movement – a verified record of events can be kept where each new event also verifies all previous events in a blockchain.
  • AI – dimensions and qualities of diamonds can be analysed to provide a digital fingerprint of a stone.
  • Verification – the use of cryptography applied to large data sets means that the data becomes practically secure from unverified parties.
  • Achieving a higher level of accountability through traceability.

The forefront of the diamond industry.

We are proud of our continued investment in trust, accountability and technology in the Pala Diamonds process. Just as we were the first UK-based trading company certified by the RJC and use market-leading technology in our verification processes, we want to be early adopters of blockchain technology.

Pala Diamonds has partnered with industry leaders iTraceiT and Tracr™,  both companies who have, time and time again, proven their reliability and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of tracking and verification technology, which will revolutionise the diamond industry.

Our customers want ethically sourced real diamonds. This solution will provide them with assurance they are buying the genuine article and provide a clear way to identify and avoid bad actors with spurious claims about the origin or nature of their goods.

We believe that the luxury sector must evolve to fully encompass traceability as standard. Adding this technology to the guarantees we already offer not only differentiates us from our competitors, it also supports our commitment to building trust and lasting relationships with our partners.