For a regional financial hub, we built a digital currency payment platform that replaces slow correspondent banking with atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement and keys held in hardware security modules. Settlement is now same-day (T+0), and costs fell 98%.
Industry: FinTech & Financial ServicesService: SaaS & SoftwareUpdated
Overview
The challenge
The client's regional payment corridor ran through a chain of correspondent banks. Each one added 0.5% in fees and 24 hours of delay. Trades could not settle as they happened, so commercial banks kept large capital buffers sitting idle in pre-funded accounts.
The hub wanted payments to settle the moment a trade was agreed, with records regulators could follow and with central banks still in full control of issuance.
Settlement windows of several days left participants exposed to currency swings and to an intermediary failing.
Fees at every hop made small cross-border payments uneconomic for SMEs.
Messages split across SWIFT and local systems made live AML and KYC tracking impossible.
The solution
Smart contracts run both legs of a currency swap at the same moment. Either both settle or neither does, which removes settlement risk between participants.
A live feed watches for changes in ledger balances and rebalances the liquidity pools automatically.
Validator nodes are secured with hardware security modules (HSMs), so central banks keep full control of the keys used to issue currency.
Before and after
Before
3-5 business days
Payments depended on bank opening hours and time zones along the corridor.
After
T+0, under a second
A payment is final the moment it is committed to the ledger, however far apart the banks are.
Before
Pre-funded nostro accounts
Commercial banks parked billions in pre-funded accounts to cover expected payment flows.
After
Just-in-time liquidity
Payments settle on demand, so banks no longer hold idle capital buffers for the corridor.
Before
Trust-based messaging
Each bank relied on its own security rules and manual reconciliation files.
After
Cryptographic proof
Identities and transactions are verified with HSM-backed cryptographic signatures.
Key features
Validator nodes run in several regions and are managed with cloud automation, so the corridor never closes.
Business impact
99.999% availability
Every ISO 20022 message and ledger change is hashed and logged, so regulators can follow activity as it happens.
Business impact
100% traceability
The global payment messaging standard runs inside the smart contract layer, so messages never wait to be converted.
Business impact
Zero translation delay
Results
99.9% Response Time Reduction
Settlement moved from 3-day manual correspondent processing to atomic execution on the ledger.
Before: 72 HoursAfter: < 1 Sec
98% Cost Reduction
Removing intermediary fees cut the overhead on each cross-border payment.
Before: High FeeAfter: Low Cost
2.5x Throughput Buffer
The distributed design handles high-volume commercial payment flows without slowing down.
Before: 2k TPSAfter: 5k+ TPS
Faster delivery
Reusing tested components saved about 14 weeks of setup work, and that time went into the parts unique to this corridor.
Our tested identity module verified each participating bank through HSM-backed signatures before it could settle on the corridor.
A reusable ledger bridge provided the link between private digital asset pools, so our engineers could concentrate on the atomic settlement logic.
An existing monitoring platform gave central bank teams a live view of ledger activity across the corridor.
Pre-built safety controls kept the automatic rebalancing of liquidity pools within agreed rules.
Trust and control
Private ledgers and zero-knowledge proofs keep each central bank's data separate while still allowing settlement between them.
PRIVATE BY DESIGNNIST-standard encryption and HSM-gated issuance are designed for 100% asset integrity: no currency can be issued without the central bank's keys.
NIST-ALIGNEDCloud-based validator nodes scale up to handle peak regional trade volumes.
CLOUD NATIVEThe client owns 100% of the bridge design and the custom smart contract logic.
100% OWNEDThe corridor settles each payment on a shared ledger using atomic delivery versus payment. Both sides of a currency swap complete at the same moment or not at all, so a payment is final when the ledger commits. That replaced 3-5 business days of correspondent banking with settlement in under a second.
Transaction costs fell by 98% because the corridor removed the correspondent banks that each added 0.5% in fees and 24 hours of delay. Capacity also grew from 2k to more than 5k transactions per second, so the network handles high-volume commercial flows without slowing down.
Issuance keys sit in hardware security modules on the validator nodes, so central banks keep full control over who can issue currency. Private ledgers and zero-knowledge proofs keep each central bank's data separate, and every ISO 20022 message and ledger change is hashed and logged for regulators.
If correspondent banking is slowing your cross-border payments, we can help you design a corridor that settles on the ledger and keeps keys under your control.