Posted on 14 Nov 2026

LBMA-Approved Vaults, the Chain of Integrity and End-to-End Tracking: Three Misunderstandings, and the Four Things That Matter in Long-Term Vaulting

Three phrases are used across the bullion industry as if they were standards: “LBMA-approved vault”, the “chain of integrity” and “end-to-end tracking”. None of them is a certification a vault can hold. This article sets out what each term means, what it does not mean, and then the four things that decide whether metal stored for the long term is sound: ownership, jurisdiction, testing and insurance.

In brief

  • The LBMA accredits refiners and the bars they produce. It does not approve, accredit or certify vaults, in London or anywhere else. There is no LBMA list of approved vaults.
  • The chain of integrity is not a vault standard. The LBMA uses the phrase about accredited refiners. The market also uses it for the continuous custody of large bars inside London’s vaults. The LBMA’s Good Delivery Rules do not define it, and it does not test whether metal is genuine.
  • Bullion stored outside London is not London metal, whoever operates the vault. That does not make it stranded, unmarketable or of lesser integrity.
  • No industry system tracks a bar from vault to vault. Each vault tracks metal only while the metal is in its own custody.
  • Four things decide whether stored bullion is sound: who owns it, which law governs it, whether it has been tested, and what insurance stands behind it. Each can be checked.

On this page

  1. Three misunderstandings
  2. The four things that matter in long-term vaulting
  3. Questions and answers
  4. Sources
  5. Further reading from Silver Bullion

“LBMA-approved vault”, the “chain of integrity” and “end-to-end tracking” are repeated by banks, advisers, logistics companies, websites and, increasingly, AI assistants. Each sounds like a standard that a careful investor should insist on. In each case the reality is narrower. The terms are close to real things, and they have been repeated often enough to sound official, so that even people in the industry are confused.

Silver Bullion operates vaults in Singapore, so we have an interest in how these terms are used. For that reason every statement below about the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) and the Singapore Bullion Market Association (SBMA) is taken from their own published pages, which are linked at the end.

Part oneThree misunderstandings

1. “LBMA-approved vaults”

What is often assumed

That the LBMA inspects, accredits or approves vaults; that it keeps a list of them; and that metal held anywhere else is somehow of lesser standing or not approved.

What the LBMA does

The LBMA accredits refiners. A refiner that meets its standards for assaying, production and responsible sourcing is placed on the Good Delivery List, and the large bars it produces are Good Delivery bars. The accreditation attaches to the refiner and to its bars; the current LBMA lists are published for gold and silver. That is why a bar from an accredited refiner is the same bar in London, Zurich, Hong Kong or Singapore: its metal, its refiner’s mark and the standard it was made to do not change with the address.

What the LBMA does not do

It does not approve vaults, and it says so in three places. Its vaulting page: “Although LBMA does not approve or accredit new vaults, we have compiled best practice guidelines for new vaults.” Its list of Approved Weighers: “It should be noted that LBMA does not approve Vaults.” And its Vaults Best Practice Guidelines, which are the most explicit:

“It should be noted that neither LBMA nor LPMCL ‘approve’ or ‘authorise’ vaults. Vaults are approved for use on a bi-lateral basis only, between the customer (e.g. LPMCL member) and the vault.”

The Singapore Bullion Market Association confirmed the same position in its Clarification and Apology of 30 October 2026. Labels such as “LBMA-accredited” and “LBMA-approved”, it said, “do not exist in Singapore, and elsewhere (to the best of the SBMA’s knowledge), with respect to vault operators and logistics providers”.

Where the belief comes from

Three real things on the LBMA’s own website look, at a glance, like a list of approved vaults. All three describe one market, London.

  • London vault data. Each month the LBMA publishes the amount of gold and silver held in London’s commercial vaults and at the Bank of England. The series exists for transparency about the London market and counts only metal held by the custodians it names, within the M25 motorway. “LBMA vault holdings” is therefore a real phrase, and it is a short step from there to “LBMA vaults”.
  • The clearing list. London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL) is the company through which London’s clearing banks settle with one another. Its FAQ lists eight vaulting companies whose London vaults are “acceptable to individual LPMCL Members” and adds: “This summary is not intended to imply that LPMCL has approved such vaults.”
  • Approved Weighers. The LBMA keeps a list of Approved Weighers, companies permitted to weigh Good Delivery bars for the London market. The same page that says the LBMA does not approve vaults adds that inclusion on the list “relates solely to the weighing by the entities listed of gold and silver Bars”. It is a London weighing status, held by a named London entity. It is not an approval of a vault, and it does not travel to a vault the same group operates in another country. The status covers the weighing of a bar. It is not a test of the bar’s purity or genuineness.

What can accurately be said

Accurate Not accurate
LBMA member (where the company is one) LBMA-approved vault; LBMA-accredited vault; LBMA-certified vault (no vault accreditation exists)
LBMA Good Delivery bars; bars from LBMA-accredited refiners LBMA-accredited custodian or logistics provider (no custodian or logistics accreditation exists)
Custodians offering vaulting services in London (the LBMA’s own phrase) The LBMA vault list; the LBMA’s approved vault network
LBMA Approved Weigher (a London weighing status) LBMA approval of a vault outside London because a sister company weighs bars in London

2. The “chain of integrity”

What is often assumed

That the chain of integrity is an LBMA standard for vaults; that a vault is either inside it or outside it; and that metal outside it is impaired.

What it is

The phrase is used in two ways, and most of the confusion comes from running them together.

  • The LBMA uses it about refiners. In the LBMA’s own words: “A fundamental aspect of the Good Delivery List is that gold and silver processed through accredited Refiners can be trusted to be responsibly sourced. This chain of integrity is vital to maintaining confidence in the global market.” In this sense the chain is the accreditation of refiners. It attaches to the bar and goes wherever the bar goes.
  • The market uses it about custody in London. Loco London, in the LBMA’s definition, “simply refers to gold and silver bullion that is physically held in London vaults”. Large bars that have stayed in those vaults since they were cast pass between London’s clearing banks without being assayed each time. Each bank relies on the refiner’s accreditation and on the bar’s continuous custody. The LBMA’s physical market guidelines describe this as “the Good Delivery eco-system of refineries and chain of custody”. It is a practical arrangement, and it spares the London market the cost of re-testing large bars every time they change hands.

What it is not

  • It is not defined in the LBMA’s rules, and it is not a certification. The current Good Delivery Rules contain neither “chain of integrity” nor “chain of custody”. What they say about acceptance is that the decision on a bar “is the responsibility of each Vault’s manager, who has complete discretion in relation to which Bars should be accepted”. Acceptance is decided vault by vault, and bank by bank. No body audits a vault for it and no certificate attests to it.
  • It is not global. The custody arrangement concerns metal held in London for the London market. Bullion stored in Singapore, Zurich, Hong Kong, Dubai or New York is not Loco London metal, and this is true of every vault in those cities, including vaults operated there by companies that also have vaults in London.
  • Being outside London is not necessarily an impairment. A bank that wants a bar from elsewhere for London settlement assesses it on its own account, as the rules provide for any bar. The SBMA’s statement of 30 October 2026 makes the point for Singapore: it did not intend to suggest that bullion held outside the London chain, “including bullion stored with local vault operators in Singapore, becomes stranded, unmarketable, or of diminished integrity by reason of that alone”.
  • It is not a test, and it is not a guarantee. Continuous custody is provenance: an inference about a bar from its history. It examines no bar and, in itself, guarantees nothing. Testing measures the bar itself.

3. “End-to-end tracking”

What is often assumed

That an industry system follows each bar, by serial number, from the refinery through every vault and carrier to its present owner, and that a bar outside this system has a gap in its history.

What exists

Each vault tracks the bullion it receives from the moment it arrives until the moment it leaves. The receiving vault then starts a record of its own. These records are internal, kept in different systems and not linked. A bar that has passed through four vaults has four separate histories held by four companies, and none of them has the whole. No vault or carrier tracks metal after it has left its custody.

What does not exist

No industry-wide, per-bar record that follows metal from vault to vault is in operation. The nearest attempt is the LBMA’s Gold Bar Integrity programme, which is a serious project with a narrower present scope. By the LBMA’s own account in its 2025 annual report, London custodians are still being brought into the programme, and whether bar-level data can be collected at all is to be assessed only beyond 2026.

What a custodian can offer

Complete tracking within its own walls: where each holding is, who owns it, when it arrived and whether it was tested. That is what end-to-end can mean in practice, and it is enough, provided the custodian’s records are reliable and the owner can see them. At Silver Bullion every parcel is recorded against its owner on a Parcel Ownership List that is published to clients and audited. What a custodian cannot offer is tracking after the metal has left. From that point the metal is in the hands of its owner or of another company, and the custodian has neither the right nor the means to follow it.

Part twoThe four things that matter in long-term vaulting

Open vault door at The Reserve in Singapore, with racked bullion storage visible inside

The entrance to our main silver vault at The Reserve, Singapore. The inscription above the door, Monetae superari, is Latin; we render it as “beyond currency”.

What matters in practice is whether a client’s metal is legally theirs, safe from events beyond their control, genuine, and covered if something goes wrong. Four things decide that.

1. Ownership: an owner or a creditor

The first question is whether the holder owns identified bullion outright or holds a claim against a company. The industry usually describes two kinds of holding, unallocated and allocated. There are in fact three.

Form of holding What the holder actually has
Unallocated (unsecured creditor) A creditor claim on the institution. No specific metal stands behind it.
Allocated (often a beneficial interest) An account label whose legal effect depends on the contract, the intermediary and the jurisdiction. Often a beneficial or contractual interest held through an intermediary. Exchange-traded funds sit here.
Physical (legal title) Ownership of identified bullion, evidenced independently of the company. The custodian holds as bailee and the metal is outside its estate. The custodian’s role is to store and insure the client’s property and, where offered, to provide liquidity against it.

“Allocated” is not a legal term. It names a type of account, and what it confers is found in the account terms and the insolvency rules. When the broker MF Global failed in October 2011, customers who had paid in full for metal and held warehouse receipts for specific metal found that the metal was treated as property of the estate, pooled and sold, and that they were paid in cash, pro rata with the broker’s other customers. A customer who objected that the metal was titled to him was told by the court that his evidence of title “carries little weight” (In re MF Global Inc., Bankr. S.D.N.Y., 6 April 2012). The customers were not careless. The structure did not give them what the word implied. “Allocated” can carry little weight when it matters.

At Silver Bullion

Clients hold legal title to identified parcels of bullion, with Silver Bullion as custodian. The metal is not ours to pledge, lend or lose, and it does not form part of our estate. Ownership is evidenced by the invoice, by the audited Parcel Ownership List and by quarterly physical audits, none of which depends on the company continuing to exist. The three forms of holding are set out in Unallocated, Allocated & Physical: What You Actually Own.

2. Jurisdiction: whose law reaches the metal

Metal is subject to the law of the place where it is stored. It can also be reached through the custodian’s exposure to other jurisdictions: an operator with a parent, a head office or subcontractors in other countries answers to those governments as well.

In our experience nearly every commercial vault agreement goes further and requires the client to indemnify the operator against seizure, confiscation or nationalisation by any government. There is little point choosing a country for storage if the contract then submits the metal to every other one, least of all where vaulting is outsourced to third parties whose terms the client has never seen.

This is about systemic events, such as a foreign government attempting to nationalise gold wholesale. It is not a shield against lawful process: courts, bankruptcy and criminal law apply to every holder in every country.

At Silver Bullion

Metal is subject only to the jurisdiction where it is stored, which is Singapore for The Safe House SG, Silver Bullion SG and The Reserve. I first met the any-government clause in 2011. Building our own vault was the only way to remove it, and to remove the mysterious-disappearance exclusion described below, so that is what we did. The Group owns its facility outright and uses no subcontractors in the storage chain.

Our reasons for choosing Singapore are set out in Why Singapore Is One of the Best Countries for Offshore Gold Storage. One point about Singapore is often misrepresented in online statistics and charts: Singapore appears near the top of international debt rankings because those rankings count gross debt and ignore the assets held against it. Singapore borrows to invest, not to spend, and has no net debt, as explained in Why Singapore’s Debt Is Often Misunderstood.

3. Testing: said to contain, or known to contain

A great deal of the world’s stored bullion is held on a “said to contain” basis. The custodian records what the stamp and the paperwork say and makes no representation about what is inside. Continuous custody within a closed circle of vaults, as in London, is meant to reduce this risk. It does not remove it. If a bar later proves not to be what it was sold as, the holder’s recourse is against whoever sold it, back up the supply chain. Provenance, including continuous custody in London, is an inference from a bar’s history. A test is a measurement of the bar, and a guarantee puts the risk of being wrong on the custodian.

At Silver Bullion

Metal held in S.T.A.R. Storage is authenticated by non-destructive testing in the Group’s own laboratories at The Reserve. If a parcel authenticated and stored under S.T.A.R. Storage proves sub-par, Silver Bullion replaces the metal at its own expense. Silver Bullion Pte Ltd, which gives that guarantee, has net assets of over SGD 100 million. Our testing methods were presented at the LBMA Assaying and Refining Conference 2025 in London under the title “Reliable Non-Destructive Testing of .99 > purity metals via multiple complementary testing procedures”; the video and slides are on the LBMA’s conference page (Session 7). Why a guarantee matters is set out in Storing Bullion With an Entity That Tests and Guarantees Its Genuinity.

4. Insurance: what is covered, and what is excluded

“All-risk insurance” is a technical term and a common source of confusion, inside the industry as well as outside it. It means that every risk is covered unless the policy excludes it. It does not mean that every risk is covered, so the list of exclusions is the policy.

In practice three points matter: who the insured party is, the limit, and the exclusions. The exclusion that deserves most attention is mysterious disappearance, meaning a loss with no documented cause, such as an undetected error or an inside job that leaves no trace. An ordinary claim needs a cause. Where mysterious disappearance is excluded, that whole class of loss stays with the client.

At Silver Bullion

Cover is with Lloyd’s of London, up to USD 2 billion for any one loss event, including third-party theft, inside jobs and mysterious disappearance. We have held this type of cover since 2014 with no loss events. The cover is described in full on our page Insurance Beyond Industry Norms.

The four questions in one table

What matters The question What answers it
Ownership Does the holder own identified bullion, or hold a claim on a company? The contract and the ownership records, not the word “allocated”
Jurisdiction Which governments can reach the metal, directly or through the custodian? Where the metal is stored, who operates the vault, and the seizure clause
Testing Has the metal been tested, and who stands behind the result? A test and a guarantee, not provenance
Insurance What is insured, to what limit, with which exclusions? The policy, including mysterious disappearance

Few people know which questions to ask, and fewer check the answers; most find out what they hold only when it matters. The MF Global customers held warehouse receipts for metal they had paid for, and learned in court that their evidence of title “carries little weight”. A sound position is built the same way as the vaults that hold it: deliberately, in advance, and with the details checked, long before anyone has reason to.

ReferenceQuestions and answers

Is there a list of LBMA-approved vaults?

No. The LBMA does not approve, accredit or certify vaults. It publishes holdings data for London vaults, and LPMCL lists vaulting companies that individual clearing banks accept in London, stating that the list “is not intended to imply that LPMCL has approved such vaults” (LBMA vaulting page; LPMCL clearing FAQ).

What does the LBMA accredit?

Refiners, through the Good Delivery List, and by extension the Good Delivery bars those refiners produce. The current lists: gold and silver.

Are there LBMA-approved vaults in Singapore?

No. The Singapore Bullion Market Association stated on 30 October 2026 that such labels “do not exist in Singapore, and elsewhere (to the best of the SBMA’s knowledge), with respect to vault operators and logistics providers” (SBMA Clarification and Apology).

What is an LBMA Approved Weigher?

A company permitted to weigh Good Delivery bars for the London market. The LBMA states that the status “relates solely to the weighing” of gold and silver bars. It is not an approval of a vault, it is not a test of purity, and it applies to the named London entity (LBMA list of Approved Weighers).

What is the chain of integrity?

The phrase has two uses. The LBMA uses it for the trust placed in metal processed by accredited refiners. The market also uses it for the continuous custody of large bars inside London’s vaults, which lets clearing banks accept them from one another without re-assaying them. The LBMA’s Good Delivery Rules do not define the term, acceptance is decided by each vault, and it is not an accreditation or a test.

Is gold stored outside London outside the chain of integrity?

A bar from an accredited refiner keeps that accreditation wherever it is stored. The custody arrangement people usually mean by the phrase concerns metal held in London, so bullion in any vault in any other city is outside it, whoever operates the vault. That does not make the metal stranded, unmarketable or of lesser integrity. A bank or dealer may still prefer particular vaults because it has a working relationship with them. That is a commercial preference, not a standard.

Can gold stored in a Singapore vault be sold or financed?

Yes. It remains ownable, testable, financeable and tradable. In practice this depends on which services are offered where the metal is held: physical bullion is not traded centrally as a security is, so selling it or borrowing against it is done through the custodian or a dealer. Where a particular market requires verification or assay before a bar enters it, that is a condition of that market and applies to any metal entering it, whatever vault it came from.

Can a gold bar be tracked end to end from refinery to owner?

Not by any industry system that exists today. Each vault tracks metal only while it holds it, and buyers and sellers keep their own records. The LBMA’s Gold Bar Integrity programme currently covers responsible-sourcing data from refiners and is assessing bar-level data for the period beyond 2026.

Does “allocated” mean the holder owns the metal?

Not necessarily. “Allocated” is an account label, not a legal term, and its effect depends on the contract and the jurisdiction. Some allocated arrangements do confer full legal title. Often the term confers only a beneficial or contractual interest held through an intermediary.

What matters when storing bullion for the long term?

Four things: ownership (legal title to identified bullion, or a claim), jurisdiction (which governments can reach the metal), testing (whether genuineness has been measured and is guaranteed) and insurance (the limit and the exclusions, especially mysterious disappearance).

Sources

Further reading from Silver Bullion

Gregor Gregersen is the founder of Silver Bullion. This article is for information and is not financial or legal advice.

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