A major Edinburgh whisky storage facility has launched using entirely digital records in a bid to prevent investment fraud and improve industry transparency.
Royal Elizabeth Bond, located at the historic Royal Elizabeth Yard near the Forth Bridge in Dalmeny, holds casks on behalf of distillers, brokers, and private owners.
The independent site has assigned a unique “Digital Deed” to every cask, replacing traditional paper delivery orders and spreadsheets with QR-coded digital identities to ensure records cannot be lost or fraudulently duplicated.
Having secured HMRC Warehouse Keepers approval in November 2025, the facility holds planning consent for over 800,000 square feet of storage, which will bring its capacity to approximately 1.1 million casks.
The shift to a digital-first approach follows a major BBC Scotland investigation broadcast in March 2025. The documentary exposed a multi-million-pound criminal commodity trade where scam companies defrauded investors by selling casks that were grossly overpriced, sold multiple times, or did not exist.
The opening also coincides with the March 2025 reform of the Warehousekeepers and Owners of Warehoused Goods Regulations (WOWGR).
The regulatory change abolished the requirement for private cask owners to register with HMRC, placing the onus on warehouse keepers to ensure accurate ownership tracking and making internal records the primary safeguard for investors.
Using the Proof 8 management platform, the Dalmeny facility records exact details of what is in a cask, who owns it, and its specific location. The approach has reduced the processing time of a 150-cask intake from up to a day to approximately 30 minutes.
Finlay Reid, Head of Operations at Royal Elizabeth Bond, said: “Because we were starting from scratch, we had a choice a lot of established operators don’t. We could inherit the old way of doing things or start clean.
“Paper and spreadsheets are prone to human error with data re-keyed, two casks entered under the same number, hours lost hunting the discrepancy.”
“One of the things cask owners care about most is knowing exactly where their cask is and having confidence in the records attached to it. The Digital Deed gives them that and they can see their cask, their liquid and the key information attached to it, any time.
“With an asset as valuable as whisky, uncertainty and ambiguity are unacceptable. We wanted to find a better way that would stand us in good stead for the future as we grow.”
Stuart Maxwell, COO at Proof 8, said: “High-profile fraud cases have shown what happens when the system relies on trust alone and the old ways of doing things. A piece of paper can be duplicated; a Digital Deed cannot.
“Royal Elizabeth Bond has done what no operator at this scale has done before, shunned paper entirely and recorded every cask digitally from day one. That gives cask owners, distillers and HMRC something the industry has been missing: proof.”
