It was announced last week that ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA), an independent specialist owned by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), will provide the price platform, methodology and overall administration for the new LBMA Gold Price. The new mechanism will now go into a testing phase before going live in the first quarter of 2015.

And in silver, CME Group and partner Thomson Reuters jointly rolled out their new silver price benchmarking system on August 15 after winning the administration of the process in July.

While in PGMs, the twice-daily benchmark for the Loco London platinum and palladium fix will now be administrated by the London Metal Exchange from December 1 this year.

“So yes, we had these very established market benchmark methodologies but they needed to change, we needed more transparency,” a managing director at a major bank said at the LBMA Conference here in Lima.

“But here’s the problem, we’ve come out of this process with three different administrators. Our compliance departments are looking at this trying to figure out which rules they have to follow. We should have all come together to look for a single administrator. That would have been the best approach,” the banking executive said.

Fragmentation of precious metal markets could lead to some headaches