Insights
Insight on the future
of interbank market rails.
Perspectives and practical analysis on sovereign settlement infrastructure, digital
brokerage, tokenisation, and governed intelligence in interbank markets.
Arguments you can check
Everything IDBX publishes, in one place. Research, conversations and definitions, each of them written so a reader can test the claim rather than take it.
We publish the case, including the parts against us.
Long form pieces on market structure, settlement, tokenisation and governed intelligence. Every one names something inconvenient for IDBX, because a case that only argues one way is advertising.
Conversations with the people who run this plumbing.
Unscripted discussions on interbank infrastructure, settlement and governed intelligence. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, or play any episode here.
Latest episodes
The IDBX Vision & Execution
Episode 1
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The $400 Trillion Question
Episode 2
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All episodes
Glossary
AIDANN
CeBM
DLT
DvP
ICSS
RTGS
PFMI
DORA
Tokenisation
The words this market uses interchangeably, defined.
Plain definitions of the terms that carry the most weight and the least agreement. Quote them, check them, or tell us where one is wrong.
Atomic settlement
Both legs of a transaction occur or neither does, as one indivisible operation. It is a guarantee about how software behaves, and it is not the same thing as settlement finality.
Central bank money
A claim on a central bank. Settling in it discharges an obligation without leaving anyone holding a claim on a commercial intermediary, which removes settlement credit risk and nothing else.
Clearing
Everything between agreeing a trade and money moving: confirmation, obligation calculation, margining, and in a cleared market the substitution of a central counterparty for the original two.
Commercial bank money
A claim on a commercial bank. Most settlement in the world happens this way, and the party receiving the money holds that bank's credit until the position is unwound.
Delivery versus payment (DvP)
The asset moves only if the payment moves. It removes principal risk, and it has been achieved for decades without any distributed ledger. The conditionality is what makes it work, not the technology.
Execution
The agreement of a trade: price, size, counterparty. It is the part of the process that has been rebuilt over thirty years, and it is not where the remaining cost sits.
Gross settlement
Each obligation is discharged individually and finally. It removes the exposure window that netting creates, and it demands materially more liquidity through the day.
Netting
Offsetting obligations so that only the difference is paid. It is enormously efficient with liquidity, which is precisely why it is used and why any replacement has to answer for what it costs.
Nostro account
An account held with another bank, in that bank's jurisdiction, so payments can be made in a currency where you have no direct central bank access. Every hop is a place a reconciliation break can begin.
Payment versus payment (PvP)
The same condition as DvP applied to two currencies: neither leg is released unless both are. It exists because two legs settling in jurisdictions whose banking days do not overlap once produced the industry's defining settlement loss.
Settlement
The discharge of the obligation. Asset delivered, payment made, nobody owes anybody anything for that trade. It is a different event from execution and from clearing, separated from them by hours or days.
Settlement finality
The point at which a transfer becomes irrevocable and unconditional, including against an insolvency practitioner acting for a failed participant. It is conferred by law and by a system's designated rules, not by a database being hard to alter.
Stablecoin
A claim on a private issuer against a pool of reserves. Not a bank deposit and not central bank money. Its quality is a statement about a particular issuer rather than about the category.
Tokenised deposit
A commercial bank deposit recorded on a programmable ledger. The record moves; the claim does not. It carries the same bank credit it carried before, and what it gains is conditionality.
Modernise interbank flows without
replacing your infrastructure.
IDBX integrates alongside existing systems, supporting progressive
adoption and flow by flow migration.
