Clearing and settlement
Two licensed principals moving money across a corridor either settle every obligation individually — moving money in both directions and stranding liquidity at a correspondent to do it — or they agree a position and settle once, net. Payzone runs the second, and records it in a form that survives a dispute.
What the platform provides is deferred net settlement of corridor positions — Corridor Net Settlement, or Deferred Corridor Net Settlement in filings. Obligations accrue across an agreed cycle, the bilateral position is netted at close, both principals countersign it, and the single net figure is settled by the parties across their own accounts.
The service is named that in the schema, append-only, so the description cannot drift from what was filed. Payzone is not in the money leg and never holds the funds: the position, the evidence and the arithmetic are what the platform contributes, and every part of it is yours to verify.
Every step is bound to something agreed in advance, so no position is ever struck at an arbitrary moment.
An obligation is assigned to a settlement cycle at the moment it is attributed — never inferred later from a date range.
A single daily cutoff per relationship, agreed by both parties, with an explicit timezone. Longer periods are whole numbers of those days.
A closed cycle refuses new assignments, so a late attribution cannot silently change a statement that was already issued.
The bilateral position is netted — but only within a group where set-off has actually been agreed.
Both principals sign the statement with keys this platform never holds. A signed statement is what ends a dispute.
One net figure moves between the parties' own accounts. Payzone never touches the fiat.
The obligation is per licensed entity, because that is where liability sits. The settlement is per treasury, because that is where the bank account sits. Thirty-five licensed operators owned by five corporations produce five settlements — not thirty-five, and not one. Netting has a natural boundary and it is not the platform's edge.
Setting off one licensed entity's obligations against another's is not something a platform may simply decide to do. Absent an agreement, each entity owes and is owed in its own right — and if one fails, its liquidator can demand the gross after the group has already paid the net. Netting is permitted by an agreement signed by every current member and by the counterparty, and it stops when that agreement does.
A payout rail pays a recipient before it has been settled with, so it carries the sending agent's exposure. That headroom is checked and reserved in one locked operation before a quote exists — because a quote shown to a customer is a promise, and a promise made against credit another branch spent three seconds ago breaks in public.
The customer hands over the principal plus the sending agent's fee, commission and margin. None of that is the rail's money, so what is reserved is the net due to the rail. Deducting the gross would consume an agent's own headroom with its own commission and shrink the corridor for no reason anyone could explain.
Corridor records are hash-chained, and verification recomputes the whole chain and names the first entry that does not follow from its predecessor. It also reports how many entries have accumulated since a head was last published outside the platform — because those entries are tamper-evident but not yet tamper-proof against us, and a green tick would hide that.
A published head can be anchored externally — a public chain, a transparency log, a regulator deposit, or the counterparty itself. Payzone records the receipt and checks the hash against the entry it claims to anchor, so a receipt for a head that never existed cannot be recorded.
Where you anchor depends on who needs to verify without trusting us. Hard-coding one target would make that choice on your behalf and be wrong for most operators, so the platform does not publish for you.
Payzone is not a settlement system, not a correspondent, not a counterparty to your obligations, and not a route around a netting agreement you have not signed. It never holds or touches fiat — the instruction boundary is sealed in the schema, not by policy. The money moves between your accounts and your counterparty's. What the platform contributes is the position, the evidence and the arithmetic, all of which you can verify without taking our word for it.
Corridor Net Settlement is a bilateral arrangement, and it is far easier to evaluate with both sides in the room.