LBMA Good Delivery: What the Standard Actually Certifies, and What It Does Not
A clear explanation of the London Bullion Market Association's Good Delivery standard, the assurances it provides, and the questions it deliberately leaves to the counterparty.
The LBMA Good Delivery list is the closest thing the gold market has to a universally accepted quality certification. A bar cast by a Good Delivery refiner, conforming to Good Delivery specifications, will settle without question against the London price benchmark and move through the wholesale market without discount. The status matters, and its precise scope is worth understanding.
Good Delivery certifies the refiner and the physical specifications of the bar: dimensions, weight tolerance, minimum fineness of 995 parts per thousand for gold, surface finish, and the presence of the refiner's stamp, serial number, year of manufacture and fineness. It also requires the refiner to satisfy the LBMA Responsible Sourcing Programme, an OECD-aligned due-diligence framework audited annually.
What Good Delivery does not certify is the origin of the metal that entered the refiner. The Responsible Sourcing Programme provides material assurance at the refiner's gate, but a Good Delivery stamp on a finished bar is not a substitute for chain-of-custody documentation from the producing mine. Institutional buyers concerned with provenance need both: Good Delivery status at the refinery, and a documented custody file from the source.
For downstream buyers, this distinction has practical consequences. A Good Delivery bar accepted into a London-based vault carries no dispute risk on physical specification and can be traded onward without re-assay. It does carry residual reputational risk if the underlying mine cannot be evidenced, which is why institutional mandates increasingly require both certifications rather than treating Good Delivery as sufficient in itself.
The workable posture is to treat Good Delivery as the necessary condition for institutional trading and provenance documentation as the sufficient one. A counterparty that offers both is operating at the market's highest standard. A counterparty that offers only one is offering a partial answer to a two-part question.