The World Gold Council, the market development organisation for the gold industry, has on August 5 launched its new Retail Gold Investment Principles (RGIPs). These Principles are designed to set the bar for product providers across the global retail gold market and further encourage retail investors to place their trust in gold.

The RGIPs will provide high-level, best practice principles for providers of all kinds of retail gold investment products and, through their adoption, ensure the highest levels of fairness, transparency and integrity are instilled across the market. It is envisaged that the adoption of best practices will lead to greater trust, benefiting customers and product providers alike, creating value and driving demand across the industry.

As part of the drafting process for the Principles, the World Gold Council ran an open consultation to seek input from product providers across the industry. Experts from over fifteen countries spanning all sectors of the retail gold investment market provided valuable feedback on both the structure and terminology of the RGIPs.

To support the retail investor and provide them with knowledge and understanding of a gold investment, the World Gold Council is today publishing an updated set of investor guidance namely the Retail Gold Investment Investor Guidance. This has been broadened to further educate investors on the range of investment models for retail gold products and includes a summary of the RGIPs and what these should mean from an investor’s perspective. It also alerts investors to the presence of scams and fraudulent behaviours in the market and how best to identify and guard against them.

David Tait, CEO World Gold Council said: “We have taken time over the past year  to engage with a wide range of industry stakeholders representing different global regions and a diverse range of business models to understand how we can best support the retail gold investment industry. Our common objective is simple; make certain that investors, especially those considering gold for the first time, have absolute trust in the products they are offered and the providers with whom they chose to transact.

Through this industry engagement it was clear to us that the market would benefit from a globally aligned set of best practices in order to ensure an effective, efficient and trusted market overall, and we believe the Principles do just that.”

This publication of the Principles and supporting implementation guidance marks the start of a multiyear, in depth engagement with the industry, region by region, to best define how the Principles can be adopted and operationalised whilst accounting for the needs of the local market.

The Principles and Investor Guidance can be accessed here.