For buyers

Stop spending months on sellers who cannot perform

Refiners and industrial buyers lose more time to unqualified counterparties than to any other part of sourcing. Post your requirement once, and let verification do the filtering before the first call rather than after the third meeting.

Five ways a sourcing desk loses a quarter

Each of these is ordinary in this market. None of them is a failure of diligence by the buyer — they are failures of the information a buyer has to work from.

Six intermediaries and no principal

An offer typically reaches a refining desk through a chain of people who each describe themselves as a mandate. Each forwards the last one's email. None can produce the company they claim to act for, and the parcel at the end of the chain frequently does not exist.

Here an offer comes from a company that has completed business verification — incorporation, ownership and control, beneficial owners, export licence — made by a named individual whose identity was checked and who holds a credential tied to that company. There is no chain. There is a counterparty.

Terms that move between the intent and the contract

Purity drifts down half a point. The assay tolerance widens. A delivery term changes and nobody flags it, because the contract was retyped by someone who was not in the negotiation.

The terms are frozen at the moment you accept, exactly as they were offered, and presented for you to carry into your own contract. Nelum drafts no agreement and witnesses no signature — but what you accepted is on the record, unedited, and both sides are looking at the same copy of it.

Documents that cannot be checked

Certificates of origin naming a mine nobody can locate. Self-issued assay certificates. Export permits covering a different consignment. By the time a document turns out to be worthless, the metal is usually in the air.

You can request any document you need, with the reason attached, and see exactly what has arrived against it. Replacing a file does not overwrite the previous one, so a document that changed after you queried it reads as precisely that.

Paying against an assay you did not commission

The most expensive failure in doré is paying on a purity that was never independently established — where the only assay in the file was produced by the party being paid.

You can engage an independent laboratory on the order itself. A mutual engagement needs both parties to accept the choice, the laboratory sees the physical facts of the job and never your commercial terms, and its report lands in the order record where both sides read the same number.

The review that comes two years later

Your compliance function, your auditor, or a tax authority asks how a specific parcel reached your refinery, who you bought it from, what you knew about its origin, and on what basis you accepted it.

The order record answers it: every document and version, every request and its reason, every message, and both parties' confirmations, retained for the periods anti-money-laundering law requires. Not a search through the mailbox of a trader who left last year.

What you post

A Letter of Intent that says what you actually want, in the terms this market uses.

Product and quantity: Refined metal, doré, concentrate or petroleum, in kilograms — one-off, or recurring weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually across a stated number of periods.
Purity and origin: Your minimum acceptable purity, treated as a floor rather than a target, and preferred country of origin where you have one.
Delivery and shipping: Delivery point and country, and whether you will accept hand-carried, bonded carrier, air or sea freight, bulk carrier or tanker — or leave it to the seller.
Pricing basis: An absolute figure, or a discount to a named benchmark — LBMA AM or PM, Platts or Argus Brent, LME cash. The discount is recorded as a term; the cash figure is agreed between you on the SPA.
Expiry: The date the intent leaves the board automatically, so it stops attracting offers once your requirement has moved on.
Your existing LOI: Attach the signed PDF and the platform reads the terms out of it to fill the form for you to check. The attachment itself stays private to your company.

Comparing what comes back

Offers on one requirement should be comparable at a glance. Most of the time they arrive as prose in six separate threads.

Terms line up in columns

Offers arrive against one intent, in one place, with quantity, purity, discount and benchmark in the same position on every row. Comparison is reading down a column rather than opening six emails.

Purity above your minimum is shown as such

92% against your stated 82% floor is displayed as the difference it is. The platform does not rank it for you — whether higher purity is what you want is a question about your process, not about the metal.

You see who you would be dealing with

Company name, country, verification status, and whether you are already connected — including whether anyone you have traded with is connected to them.

Declining costs you nothing

Decline with a reason or without one. An offer you decline can be replaced by a better one from the same seller; nothing about the exchange is final until you accept.

Private requirements stay private

Where you would rather not publish a requirement at all, send it to named connections only. It never appears on the public board.

When one requirement draws on several sources

Aggregating small-scale production into a refinery intake is normal. Aggregating its paperwork is not acceptable, and the distinction matters more than it first appears.

One requirement, several producers: A large requirement rarely comes from one small-scale source. Where it is filled from several, each fill is its own order with its own counterparty and its own record.
Records never pool: Provenance, assay and shipping documents stay per order. OECD five-step due diligence and chain-of-custody schemes require each source to be traceable separately — a merged lot record defeats the purpose and would not survive review.
Progress is not a consignment: Where the platform shows how much of a requirement has been filled, that is a progress indicator. It never presents material from different sources as a single consignment.

What sellers see, and what they do not

Verified sellers see your commercial terms in full — that is the point of posting. They see your company, your country, your verification status and how long you have been registered.

They do not see your verification documents, your other requirements, the offers anyone else has made, or anything belonging to an order they are not party to. Knowing which refiner is seeking what volume, at what purity, on what schedule, is commercially valuable information — and none of it is published to companies that have not been checked.

Questions buyers ask

Do sellers see my legal name while I am browsing?: They see your company name, country, verification status and reference on the board — enough to decide whether to engage. Full legal detail is exchanged when an order binds you both.
Can I keep a requirement off the public board entirely?: Yes. Send it privately to named connections. It is visible only to the companies you choose, and nobody else can reach it — that restriction is enforced in the database, not in the interface.
Who can commit my company?: Accepting an offer opens a binding order, so it requires director-level authority. Traders can post and negotiate; logistics users work shipments without sight of the commercial terms; viewers cannot commit anything.
How does settlement work?: However you and the seller agree. Bank transfer, letter of credit and documentary collection are arranged with your own banks. Where you both choose on-chain settlement, the wallet is yours and Nelum's role is read-only verification — we hold no funds and are not an escrow agent.
What if a seller uploads the wrong document?: They can replace it. The new file becomes the next version and the earlier one stays on the record, so a correction is visible as a correction rather than an unexplained change.
What does it cost to buy here?: A company subscription, and never a percentage of what you trade. Nelum is not a party to your transaction and takes no cut of it — see pricing.