Lending With Confidence: How Qollateral Underwrites Diamond-Backed Loans With Rapaport Trade
Qollateral lends against diamonds, fine jewelry, luxury watches and other luxury assets for private clients and members of the diamond and jewelry trade, including dealers, wholesalers and jewelers. Headquartered on 47th Street in New York’s Diamond District, the company serves clients locally and nationwide, providing loans from about $2,000 to $10 million and handles dozens of trade-side transactions every week.
Qollateral lends its own capital against diamonds and jewelry, so a wrong valuation is a direct hit to the business, not a hypothetical. A stone’s GIA report and its benchmark price establish roughly what it’s worth on paper, but does not show what comparable diamonds are actually being sold for right now, and that gap is exactly where over-lending happens.
Qollateral also runs on speed. For a straightforward transaction, once an asset is authenticated, evaluated and documented, the company can fund it in as little as 20 to 30 minutes. Moving that fast while risking its own capital leaves no room for erroneous valuations built on a retail appraisal or stale benchmarks instead of what the market will actually pay today.
For every diamond that comes in as collateral, whether from a private client or a member of the trade, Qollateral’s appraisal team physically evaluates the stone and reviews its grading. From there, the team turns to Rapaport Trade, starting with the Rapaport Price List as a benchmark and researching comparable diamonds by shape, carat weight, color, clarity, cut and fluorescence, to see what those stones are asking for and their RAPI discounts.
Rapaport Trade lets the team quickly pull relevant stones and dealer-to-dealer comparables, adding a layer of current wholesale market intelligence to every valuation, information a retail appraisal or a dealer’s own wholesale figure cannot provide on its own.
With Rapaport Trade built into its underwriting process, Qollateral compares collateral against diamonds actively offered in the wholesale market, identifies meaningful pricing gaps, and sets loan values that hold up against real market conditions. That reduces the risk of over-lending and lets clients, private owners and trade members alike, unlock capital from diamonds and jewelry they have no intention of selling.
The time saved compounds. Without a centralized marketplace, researching a significant or unusual diamond can mean checking multiple sources and contacting dealers directly. With Rapaport Trade, Qollateral can identify a meaningful set of comparables within minutes, a saving that adds up across the volume of diamonds and jewelry the company evaluates each week.
That speed and accuracy show up in client behavior. Roughly 40% of Qollateral’s borrowers are returning clients, a sign that the company’s approach to unlocking liquidity without requiring a sale is working for both sides of its business.
Qollateral recently completed a collateral loan against an 11-carat, D-color, Flawless diamond. On a stone of that caliber, even a 5% difference in valuation can represent tens of thousands of dollars. After physically evaluating the stone and reviewing its GIA report, the team used Rapaport Trade to research comparable high-quality diamonds on the wholesale market, along with their asking prices and RAPI discounts.
Within minutes, the team had the additional market context needed to set an appropriate collateral value and complete the loan.
No commitment. For members of the trade only.
