Treasury teams often judge their position by the closing balance. Payments, however, fail during the day, not at night. What matters is whether the right money is in the right place at the right hour. Intraday liquidity — not the end-of-day number — is the constraint that quietly sets the cost and reliability of cross-border settlement.

The structural squeeze

The number of active correspondent banks worldwide fell by roughly 22% between 2011 and 2019, even as payment volumes rose. In Latin America, active relationships are down about 30% since 2012. Fewer links mean fewer options, thinner buffers and more concentration in the corridors that remain. Prefunding each one looks safe, but it ties up working capital in accounts that must be topped up before they are ever used.

The G20 set cross-border targets in 2021 — average retail cost no higher than 1%, no corridor above 3%, and 75% of payments delivered within an hour, mostly by end-2027. The FSB's 2025 report shows limited progress: around 35% of payments arrived within an hour. Intraday liquidity is a large part of why.

Managing the hour, not the day

A settlement network changes the arithmetic by cancelling offsetting flows internally before anything leaves. Where opposite flows cancel, participants need less prefunded balance to move the same volume. A single order book does the netting; AI routing then picks the cheapest, fastest and most reliable path for the remainder, weighing hub participants, card networks, local instant payments, SWIFT, stablecoins and agent protocols by cost, settlement time, reliability and regulatory fit.

Controls that make it work

Intraday flexibility only holds if it is governed. Limits, approved counterparties and approval thresholds sit below the model, where an agent cannot argue with them. Operations above a limit become a human approval request rather than a silent rejection, and every entry stays traceable to a principal, an agent and a policy version.

In short

  • Closing balances hide the real constraint: intraday timing.
  • Corridor concentration has worsened as correspondent links declined.
  • Netting reduces the prefunded balance needed for the same volume.
  • Routing evaluates cost, time, reliability and regulatory fit per payment.

Explore the settlement design behind the hub → /protocol/