What Mastercard's 24/7 Settlement Changes for Treasury Teams

Editorial Calendar World-Region-Country What Mastercard’s 24/7 Settlement Changes for Treasury Teams Nigel Brook-Walters, chief revenue officer atCoinPayments, a payments infrastructure business that lets merchants accept more than 40 digital assets across more than 180 countries, answered seven written questions from The Fintech Times. The questions asked him to set out where the gains actually land, with numbers, and where the argument fails. His first distinction is between optionality and activity.

“What changes is optionality, not activity. A treasurer can now move funds outside theFedwire/CHAPS/SWIFTcut-off window, whether that be Saturday afternoon or Sunday night, rather than parking the decision until Monday.” That is real, he said, for anyone managing intraday liquidity across time zones, particularly around month-end or quarter-end sweeps. What does not change is everything above the rail: the FX decision, the credit approval and the treasury policy that governs whether liquidity should move at all.

The rail has got faster, in his account, and the decision-making above it has not moved. The pitch that brought this interview to The Fintech Times cited 60 per cent of B2B cross-border payments settling in more than a day. Asked for the source, Brook-Walters said the figure is drawn fromECBresearch on international B2B settlement times that analysed business-to-business and business-to-person cross-border payments worth 20,000 US dollars sent from countries in Europe and Central Asia to the rest of the world.

It found that only around 40 per cent of international B2B transactions settled within one working day. He was direct about its limits: it is a settlement-time statistic, not a breakdown of rail delay against compliance delay, and the ECB does not decompose it that way. In CoinPayments’ own experience the causes are case-specific.

For a known counterparty with robust know-your-customer checks, the rails themselves, meaning correspondent banking hops and batch cut-offs, are