Terms of membership

This is a draft prepared for review. It has been written from the IBX code and product specification, not from instructions by a lawyer, and it is not legal advice. Every item in [SQUARE BRACKETS] is a fact the owner must supply before this is published.

These terms are the agreement between you and [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] about your membership of IBX. Please read them. They are written in plain English on purpose: if a sentence here is hard to follow, that is our fault and we want to hear about it at [MEMBERSHIP EMAIL].

Along with these terms, two other documents are part of the agreement:

• the community guidelines in section 7, which are the same ten rules our automated checker is given word for word; and
• the privacy notice at joinibx.com/privacy.

1. Who you are contracting with

Your invoice may be issued by a different company in our group or a billing partner for your country. The invoice names the entity that issued it. That entity is responsible for the invoice; [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] is responsible for your membership.

"We", "us" and "IBX" mean [LEGAL ENTITY NAME]. "You" means the member — one living person, not a company (see section 2).

2. Who can be a member

• You must be 18 or over. You confirm this with a tick box when you apply. We do not collect your date of birth.
• Membership belongs to a person, not to a company. One person, one identity, one wallet. If you run several businesses, that is several cards on one identity — not several accounts.
• You must have a real, current business card of your own, and the card you post must be yours. Posting someone else's card is grounds for removal.
• You must be able to receive email at an address you control, because that is how you sign in and how we send your invoices.
• You must not be a person, or act for a company, that either end of a corridor you trade in prohibits us from dealing with — for example because of sanctions or export controls.
• We may refuse any application, and we do not have to give a reason beyond the one we give.

Account sharing. Your account is yours. Do not let anyone else sign in as you, and do not transfer or sell your membership, your standing or your title.

3. Applying, and being approved

1. You see the price for your country on the public site before you do anything else, and you can search coverage — how many members are in a country and sector — before you apply. Those counts are aggregates only; under 20 they read "fewer than 20". You will never see a member's card or name before you join.
2. You apply with a photograph of your card, one line about what you are looking for or can introduce, optionally who invited you, and your email address.
3. We review the application. Our automated checker reads the card and gives an opinion; a person decides. We aim to answer within 24 hours. Section 11 explains how to appeal.
4. If we approve you, we issue your dues invoice. Your card goes live and your wallet opens when the dues are settled — or when a grant covers them.
5. Two existing members may be asked to review your application. They see what you submitted and nothing else about you.

Vouching and invitations. Members can invite people. An invitation must carry a real ask or offer, never a bare link, and the inviter's name is shown on the invitee's card. Members may issue a limited number of invitations a year, according to their title. An invitation is a recommendation; it does not guarantee approval.

If we decline you, we keep your application record and tell you why. You may apply again.

4. What membership gives you

• Your card in the network, visible to the members you exchange with. Not to the public, not to search engines, and not searchable by other members.
• A wallet of cards you have exchanged, within the slot limits in section 8.
• The right to post asks and offers, within the limits in section 8.
• The right to introduce cards in your wallet to other members' asks, and to be introduced.
• Contact details on an accept. When an asker accepts an introduction, the phone number and email on both cards are revealed to those two people — and only to them.
• A record of your accepted introductions, which is the only thing that builds standing here. Not likes, not posts, not activity.
• Invoices, receipts and an annual statement.

5. What membership does not give you

Please be clear about this before you pay.

• No guarantee of introductions, of accepts, or of any business outcome. Dues buy your place in the room and your identity in it. They do not buy results.
• No directory, no search, no browsing of other members. You can search your own wallet and your own posts. That is all. If you joined hoping to look people up, IBX is the wrong product and you should not pay.
• No messaging. There is no inbox and no chat. Conversation happens off IBX, after an accept, using the contact details that were revealed.
• No public profile. No bio, no portfolio, no follower count, no feed of content, no likes.
• No lead list, no export of other members' contacts, no data. What you unlock from an accept is for you, for that introduction. See section 7, rule 7.
• No vetting of anyone's business. See section 12. This is important.

6. Dues, renewal and grants

Dues are annual, in advance, priced by a band for your country, in your local currency where we publish one. The price you see on the public site for your country is the price you pay. There is no monthly option.

What else can be charged, if you choose it: verification at Tier 1 (USD 30 in Band A, USD 10 in other bands, or the local equivalent we publish), an extra card at 25% of your band's annual dues per year, gifts you choose to give, and company or institution seats.

Tax. Where we are registered for tax in your country, the tax is contained inside the displayed price, so the round number you were shown does not move. Where the law requires tax on top, the public price says so. Where we are not registered, no tax is charged and your receipt says why. Your receipt is a tax-valid receipt from the entity that issued it.

Grants. We seed new corridors with grants — founder, event, invitation, institution seat, sponsor and corridor promotion. A grant is a grant. It is recorded as a party that pays against the full displayed price, which never moves and stays visible on the invoice and the receipt. One grant per member, ever. The next year is always at the full price, and a grant is never carried over.

Renewal. Your membership year renews on its anniversary. Two weeks before, we send your annual statement and your renewal invoice at the full price, due on the anniversary. If you do not want to renew, cancel before the anniversary — see section 14.

If dues are not paid. The invoice becomes overdue after its due date. Thirty days after the anniversary, your card goes quiet: you cannot post a new ask. Nothing you already have is taken away — every accept, every unlocked contact and every chain you are part of stays exactly as it is, and your wallet is untouched. Settle the arrears and your card wakes up.

How you pay. Today, by bank transfer against your invoice number, using the instructions we send you. We record the money when it arrives. We may add other payment methods; we will tell you when we do.

Refunds. [REFUND POLICY — THE OWNER MUST DECIDE. See LEGAL-REVIEW-NOTES.md. Note that if you are a consumer in the EU or the UK you may have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days of joining, which these terms cannot remove.]

Gifts. After an accept, a member may give the person who helped them a gift: a year of dues, a Patron mark, a sponsored newcomer, a contribution to a corridor fund, a club object, an item from a gift registry, or a printed thank-you. The giver pays; the recipient never receives money; physical gifts are capped at the equivalent of USD 100; nothing is redeemable for cash; and a gift may always be declined. A gift is thanks for help already given — never an inducement for help to come. A corridor-fund contribution is a purchase of our services, not a donation, and the receipt says so.

7. Community guidelines — the ten rules

These are part of this agreement. They are also the exact text our automated checker is given, so they are not decoration.

1. Be who your card says. Post only your own, current card. One person, one identity; several businesses are several cards on that identity.
2. An ask seeks a person. "Looking for a customs broker in Chennai" is an ask. A job posting, a product advertisement, a promotion, a fundraising appeal, a survey or an event invitation is not, because each invites a crowd rather than a contact.
3. An offer says what you can introduce. "I can introduce you to furniture buyers in Hamburg" is an offer. "I can help with anything" is not, and neither is a service for sale.
4. Say enough to be routed. An ask names what is sought, in what place, for what purpose. A vague ask is returned to you, not refused.
5. Introduce only when you believe the card can help. Never as a favour, never in bulk, never your own card to every ask.
6. Keep contact details out of posts. No phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses or third-party names in the text. The product reveals contacts on an accept; that is its job, not yours.
7. What you unlock stays with you. Contacts revealed by an accept are not shared, exported, scraped or screenshotted for anyone else. Treat them as you would a card handed to you across a table.
8. No discrimination in asks or offers. No requirements or exclusions by age, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality of the person or anything similar. Requirements about the *business* — location, certification, volume — are fine.
9. Trade lawfully. Nothing illegal in either country of an international ask. No restricted goods, no sanctioned parties, no export-controlled items.
10. Be honest in the chain. Do not misrepresent an ask you pass on, an introduction you make, or a company you claim.

And one more, about gifts: a gift is thanks for help received, never an inducement for help to come.

Also prohibited, for the avoidance of doubt: opening a second account; using someone else's card or image; automated scraping or bulk collection of anything in IBX; trying to get around any limit in section 8; reverse-engineering or attacking the service; or using IBX to send unsolicited sales messages to anyone, member or not.

8. The limits are product rules, not technical accidents

IBX works because it is rationed. These limits are deliberate, they apply to everyone, and there is no way to buy past them. If you find a way around one, that is a bug and using it is a breach of these terms.

We also apply ordinary rate limits on how fast you can post, introduce, exchange, flag and appeal, so that nobody can flood the network. If you hit one, wait and try again.

We may change these numbers — the wallet limits in particular are set by us and can move. We will never lower a limit in a way that takes a card, an accept or an unlocked contact away from you. Lowering a wallet limit means you cannot add more until you retire some; it never removes anything.

9. Your card, your content, and who owns what

You keep everything that is yours. Your card, the photograph of it, the fields printed on it, the lines you write, your asks, your offers, your notes and your messages remain yours.

You give us a licence to run the service with them. You grant [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] a worldwide, non-exclusive licence, for which we pay nothing and charge nothing, to store, copy, process, translate, display and transmit your card and your content only as needed to operate IBX as described in these terms and the privacy notice — which includes showing your card to members you exchange with, sending your card image and post text to our AI processor to be read, checked, translated and screened, and drawing the typeset version of your card that the app shows. The licence lasts as long as we hold the content and ends when it is deleted, except where a chain record or a tax record must be kept (see the privacy notice, section 9).

You confirm, when you post a card, that: it is your own current card; you are entitled to publish the details on it; and the company and role on it are real.

We own IBX itself — the apps, the websites, the back office, the design, the brand, the name "IBX", the routing and credit logic, and the typeset card rendering as a piece of software. You may not copy it, resell access to it, or build a competing product from it.

Aggregate numbers are ours. Counts, coverage figures and metrics that do not identify anybody are ours to publish, and we will keep publishing nothing below 20 as a number.

Other members' content is theirs. You may use a card revealed to you by an accept to do business with that person. You may not add it to a list you sell, upload it to a tool, or pass it on. That is rule 7, and it is the rule we take most seriously.

10. Suspending and ending a membership — the ladder

Every step is private except the last. Nobody else is told, and a member who has been flagged is never shown the flag or who raised it.

We can only remove you after a suspension that an appeal did not overturn, or when the law requires it. That is enforced in our systems, not just promised here.

Flags from other members always go to a human queue, with a 72-hour service target. A confirmed fraudulent contact removes credit from everyone on that chain and suspends the flagged card pending review.

11. Appeals

You can appeal any refusal, warning, limit, suspension or removal, and any automated decision, from inside the app. The reviewer sees the post, the automated decision, and your history of returns and refusals. Nothing else.

• We aim to decide within 72 hours.
• A person decides. Always.
• You get one appeal per decision, and it is decided once.
• If your appeal succeeds, the step is lifted and any credit that was reversed is restored.
• You are told when a decision was made with the help of an automated system, and you are told the reason for the decision.

If you think we got it wrong after an appeal, write to [MEMBERSHIP EMAIL]. You can also go to court or, for privacy matters, to a data protection authority — see the privacy notice, section 16.

12. Introductions: what we do and do not stand behind

Read this twice. It is the most important limit in this agreement.

IBX routes an introduction from one member to another. We do not vet anybody's business.

• We do not check that a member is solvent, honest, competent, licensed, insured, or able to do what they say.
• We do not check goods, prices, contracts, deliveries, payments, quality or title.
• A vouch is one member's personal opinion, offered at that moment. "I know them" means they believe the card can help. It is not a guarantee, a reference, a credit check or a warranty, from that member or from us.
• Verification means what it says and no more. Tier 1 means a website, a company registry record or an ownership code checked out at the time we looked. "Met in person" means some members scanned each other's cards in the same room. Neither tells you whether someone is good to do business with.
• Fraud screening is best effort, and it is not sanctions screening. We check cards, asks and offers for known fraud patterns, and our content rules refuse posts that are about sanctioned parties or export-controlled goods on their face. We do not check you, the people you are introduced to, or the companies involved against any sanctions or watch list. Screening catches patterns; it does not catch everything, and a clean screen is not a clearance of anyone or anything.

Everything you do after an accept is between you and the other person. Your contract, your money, your goods, your delivery, your tax, your licences, your export paperwork, your sanctions compliance. We are not a party to it, not your agent, not a broker, not an escrow, and we take no commission on it. We are not liable for it.

Do your own checks before you send money or sign anything. If someone you were introduced to asks for an advance fee, a deposit to an unexpected account, or pressures you to pay quickly, stop and flag them in the app.

13. What we promise about the service, and what we do not

We will run IBX with reasonable skill and care, and we will try hard to keep it available and correct. But we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, that it will have no faults, that an ask will reach anyone, or that any particular feature will keep existing. We may change the product, and we will tell members about changes that matter.

To the extent the law lets us, we exclude all other warranties, conditions and terms that would otherwise apply by implication. If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms removes or reduces any right you have under the law of your own country that cannot be removed by agreement. That includes, where it applies, your statutory right to cancel a contract made at a distance.

14. Liability

Nothing in this section limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or anything else that cannot be limited under [GOVERNING LAW COUNTRY] law.

Subject to that:

1. We are not liable for the conduct of other members, for any business you do after an introduction, or for any loss arising from it. Section 12 explains why.
2. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profit, lost revenue, lost business, lost opportunity, lost goodwill, or wasted expenditure.
3. Our total liability to you, for everything arising out of or connected with your membership in any twelve-month period, is limited to [LIABILITY CAP — PROPOSED: THE DUES YOU ACTUALLY PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM].
4. You are responsible for what you do here. If we suffer a loss or a claim because you broke these terms — you posted someone else's card, you sold on contacts you unlocked, you traded unlawfully — you will cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it.

If a grant covered your dues, the cap in point 3 is the full displayed price of the membership the grant covered. A grant does not reduce your rights.

15. Ending your membership

You can leave at any time.

• Not renewing. Tell us before your anniversary, or simply do not pay the renewal invoice. Your card goes quiet 30 days after the anniversary. Nothing you already have is taken away.
• Deleting your account. You can delete it yourself, from the app or the member website, and we will ask you to confirm with a one-time code sent to your own sign-in address. We hold the request for 14 days so you can change your mind with one tap, then it executes. Deletion completes within 30 days of your request.

What deletion does, and the one thing it cannot do. Your cards, photographs, contact details, wallet, messages, notifications, devices and sessions are deleted. But introductions and accepts that already happened are a record two other people share, so they are never rewritten: your place in them becomes an anonymous marker that leads nowhere back to you. Invoices are kept, against that marker, for as long as tax law requires. Our security audit record keeps the rows written while your account existed. The privacy notice, section 9, sets this out in full and in plain terms — please read it before you delete, because we cannot undo a deletion once it has run.

One consequence to know about: if you are holding an introduction when your deletion runs, that hop is dismissed. The asker's branch of the chain simply ends. Nothing you can do changes that, and we would rather say so than let you find out.

We can end your membership by removing you under section 10, or by closing IBX or a corridor. If we close a corridor or the service, we will give members at least [NOTICE PERIOD, SUGGESTED: 60 DAYS] notice and [REFUND OR PRO-RATA POSITION ON CLOSURE — OWNER TO DECIDE].

What survives the end of your membership: sections 9 (the parts about our ownership and about other members' content), 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17.

16. Changing these terms

We can change these terms. If a change matters to you — the price, the limits, your rights, how we may use your content — we will tell you by push notification or email at least [NOTICE PERIOD, SUGGESTED: 30 DAYS] before it takes effect, and the change will not apply to a membership year you have already paid for unless you accept it.

If you do not want to accept a change, you can end your membership before it takes effect and [POSITION ON A PRO-RATA REFUND IN THAT CASE — OWNER TO DECIDE].

We will not change a price mid-year. A price change applies from your next renewal. A country's dues band can be set lower at launch, and once a corridor opens it is frozen and never moves up for the members in it.

17. Law, courts and disputes

These terms, and any dispute about them or about your membership, are governed by the law of [GOVERNING LAW COUNTRY].

Disputes go to [COURTS OR ARBITRATION FORUM, AND ITS SEAT].

If you are a consumer — for example a sole trader who is treated as a consumer where you live — you may have the right to bring a claim in the courts of your own country, and to the protection of your own country's consumer law. Nothing here takes that away. If you are in the EU, you may also be able to use an online dispute resolution service: [ODR / ADR BODY, IF ANY].

Please talk to us first. Write to [MEMBERSHIP EMAIL] setting out what went wrong and what you want. Most things are fixed in a day.

18. Odds and ends

• Notices. We will write to the email address you sign in with, or notify you in the app. Formal legal notices to us go to [POSTAL ADDRESS FOR LEGAL NOTICES].
• Language. These terms are written in English. We may publish translations for convenience; if there is a conflict, the English version governs [CHECK: SOME COUNTRIES REQUIRE THE LOCAL LANGUAGE TO GOVERN FOR CONSUMERS].
• No partnership. Nothing here makes either of us the other's agent, partner, employee or joint venturer.
• Transfer. You cannot transfer your membership. We may transfer this agreement to a company that takes over our business, as long as your rights are not reduced.
• If one part fails. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given it up.
• The whole agreement. These terms, the community guidelines and the privacy notice are the whole agreement between us about your membership, and they replace anything said before.

IBX — International Business Exchange

Operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS].

Version: terms-2026-10-27-draft-1

Last updated: 27 October 2026