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Every international deal eventually arrives at the same impasse. The buyer wants to pay in what they hold. The seller wants to receive what they can spend. The broker in the middle needs a commission in the currency of their home market. The title company or closing attorney is billing in a fourth denomination entirely. Nobody is being unreasonable. They are each just operating from a different financial reality, and the settlement professional standing at the centre of the transaction is the one who has to make all of it work simultaneously, under time pressure, without a single leg falling over.
This article is written for those professionals — settlement agents, closing attorneys, escrow officers, OTC desks, commercial brokers — who live with this problem on a recurring basis. It explains the mechanics of cross-currency settlement, the risks that the traditional workflow introduces at each stage, and how onchain payment routing is changing the practical geometry of the problem.
Figures from the cost section and the worked warehouse portfolio scenario below.
Why the currency mismatch matters more than it appears
At first glance, currency mismatch looks like a foreign exchange problem — a task for the FX desk, not the settlement desk. Handle the conversion and everything lines up. In practice, the problem is structural rather than arithmetic, and it compounds across three distinct risk layers that a settlement professional must manage in parallel.
Rate risk. When funds move between currencies, financial institutions and payment providers apply exchange rates that may include markups, and those rates can fluctuate between payment initiation and settlement, creating foreign exchange risk for recurring international payments. On a $500,000 deal (approximately AUD 775,000 at current rates), even a one-percent adverse move translates to $5,000 the closing table has not budgeted for.
Settlement timing risk. The greatest risk associated with forex settlement is principal risk, also known as Herstatt risk. This occurs when one party in a currency exchange sends their currency but never receives the counter-currency due to counterparty failure, time zone mismatches, or settlement delays. For a deal with three or four payees in different jurisdictions, every additional leg is an additional moment of exposure. Settlement risk — the risk that a party makes its payment but does not receive the payment it expects — can cause a large loss, and this risk arises in FX trading because payment and receipt of payment often do not occur simultaneously.
Sequencing risk. Multi-party deals require that each leg completes in the correct order: the seller does not release, and the agent does not get paid, until funds have been confirmed received. Cross-border payments can take anywhere between five minutes and five days to settle. When a single deal has four payees on three continents and two legs of that payment are travelling through the correspondent banking system, the settlement window is open and uncomfortable for everyone — including the attorney who has signed off on disbursement instructions and is now waiting on SWIFT confirmations.
The architecture of a multi-currency deal: three common scenarios
To understand the problem concretely, it helps to walk through how different deal types generate different currency geometries. Each scenario is stylised but drawn from deal structures that settlement professionals regularly encounter.
Scenario 1 — Cross-border commercial property acquisition
A US-based private equity fund is acquiring a warehouse portfolio in Australia. The purchase price is $12 million (approximately AUD 18.6 million). The fund is paying in USD from a US account. The Australian vendor wants to receive AUD because that is where their operating entity is domiciled and where their lender sits. The fund's acquisition broker is in Singapore and bills in SGD. The title agent handling the Australian side bills in AUD. The US closing attorney bills in USD. The fund's US-side financial advisor takes a success fee in USD.
At closing, a single inbound payment in USD must simultaneously satisfy recipients in three currencies across three time zones. The traditional path runs like this: the fund wires USD to the US attorney's trust account, the attorney converts a portion to AUD via a correspondent bank, waits for confirmation, wires AUD to the Australian vendor and the title agent, separately wires SGD to the Singapore broker, and retains USD for the US recipients. Traditional correspondent banking routes create 3–5 business day settlement windows, leaving vendors waiting and the AP team unable to close the books. A traditional cross-border payment passes through two to four correspondent banks, each adding time, cost, and an FX cut.
That is at minimum four discrete wire instructions, two FX conversions, and a settlement window that spans days. The vendor in Australia is not receiving confirmation simultaneously with the attorneys in the US. The broker in Singapore may receive funds on a different business day than everyone else because of cut-off time mismatches between banking systems.
Scenario 2 — International M&A with multi-jurisdiction advisors
A European acquirer is purchasing a mid-market SaaS company headquartered in New York. The deal is denominated in USD. The sell-side M&A advisor is in London and bills in GBP. The legal counsel for the acquirer is in Frankfurt and bills in EUR. The seller's attorney is in New York and bills in USD. The seller themselves is based in Canada and wants to receive CAD, not USD, to avoid a personal FX event on their tax return.
Deal structure and financing exposure means currency mismatches between payments and recipient cash flows can distort projections. Post-merger integration complexity means payroll, vendor, and intercompany contracts often span multiple currencies. In a deal like this, the complications begin before closing — because every advisor is estimating their fee in their home currency, and the USD-denominated deal price means the GBP figure on the London advisor's invoice is a moving target until the wire hits.
Scenario 3 — Commodity off-take agreement with OTC settlement
A mining company in Western Australia is signing an annual off-take agreement with a buyer in Japan. The contract is priced in USD because commodity contract convention dictates it, but the mining company's operating costs are in AUD and the Japanese buyer's treasury is in JPY. The OTC desk facilitating settlement needs to ensure that, upon each delivery cycle, USD moves from Japan, converts to AUD for the Australian entity, and any brokerage or trade-finance fee is disbursed simultaneously without one leg settling before another.
In this structure, the OTC desk is the professional at the centre, and their credibility depends on simultaneous, confirmed, final settlement. A payout that takes three days to confirm is not just slow — it is a business risk that the counterparty in the next cycle will price into their negotiating position.
What traditional multi-currency settlement actually costs
The cost of settling across currencies is not limited to the FX markup, though that alone can be substantial. Banks and intermediaries can apply FX markups of up to 3% above the mid-market rate, plus fixed wire fees at each step in the payment chain — on a $200,000 invoice, that's $6,000 in hidden costs.
Beyond the markup, there are structural costs that do not appear on any invoice:
Time cost of sequential settlement. Because traditional correspondent banking requires each leg to clear before the next instruction is issued, a four-party closing in three currencies can span five business days from the first wire to final confirmation of all recipients. For the settlement professional, that is five days of open files, open liability, and open client questions.
FX timing mismatch. The rate applied to conversion leg one may be materially different from the rate applied to conversion leg two if they clear on different days. Invoice a customer today, they pay ninety days later — after rates shift, meaning you receive less than expected. And the same risk exists with outgoing payments when fixed-price contracts are negotiated months in advance. In a deal where the closing attorney converts USD to AUD on Wednesday and the remaining USD to GBP on Friday, the two conversions happened at two different spots, and the deal economics have shifted from what was modelled at signing.
Correspondent bank fees, compounded. Correspondent banks act as agents between domestic and international banks when there is no existing banking relationship. While they are fundamental to making international payments, they add delays to settlement times and charge fees of anywhere from $25 to $75 per transaction. Multiply that by four legs, and the fee structure alone is non-trivial on a mid-market deal.
Reconciliation burden. Dealing with payments across different currencies can lead to discrepancies in records, especially when varying rates apply during settlement. Each leg settles at a slightly different rate, each bank applies its own rounding convention, and the settlement agent must reconcile multiple confirmation statements across multiple currencies before they can close the file.
The professional's toolkit: how settlement agents manage currency mismatch today
Experienced settlement professionals have developed a range of techniques for managing cross-currency risk. Each approach has genuine merit, and each has a structural limitation worth understanding.
Pre-agreed FX rate at signing
Some attorneys and settlement agents negotiate a locked rate with the FX provider at the time the contract is signed, insulating the deal from spot movement during the closing period. This works well when the closing timeline is short and the FX provider's lock period covers it. When closings slip — and international deals slip regularly due to regulatory, legal, or financing complications — the lock expires and the rate question reopens.
Multi-currency trust accounts
Some firms maintain accounts in multiple currencies, allowing them to hold USD, AUD, GBP, and EUR simultaneously and disburse directly in each currency without converting at the moment of closing. This compresses the FX timing risk because conversions happen in advance, during quieter periods, at rates the firm chooses. Multi-currency accounts let firms hold balances in several foreign currencies simultaneously and convert funds when exchange rates are favorable rather than at the moment of payment — particularly effective for transactions with vendors paid regularly in the same currency, reducing FX costs and gaining more control over timing.
The limitation: the firm is now holding a foreign currency position on behalf of clients. That is a treasury function, with its own complexity, regulatory implications, and counterparty exposure.
Sequential settlement with same-day SWIFT
For high-value deals, some OTC desks and settlement agents route all legs through same-day SWIFT and require all parties to have accounts at banks with extended cut-off windows. This tightens the settlement window dramatically. The payment is routed through the appropriate payment rail — SWIFT for global bank-to-bank messaging, SEPA for euro-denominated European payments, local ACH networks for domestic-equivalent processing, or real-time payment rails for eligible corridors — and the rail selected determines cost, speed, and settlement certainty.
The limitation: same-day SWIFT requires all parties' banks to cooperate simultaneously, and the "same day" guarantee depends on every counterparty bank honoring its cut-off schedule. Missing a cut-off time can push settlement to the next business day, leaving more time for something to go wrong.
Stablecoin as a settlement bridge
An increasingly practical technique involves using a dollar-pegged stablecoin as the settlement currency for the routing leg, even when the final recipients want fiat in their local currency. A business may debit a US dollar account, settle over a blockchain, convert into local currency, and pay out through a domestic rail. B2B stablecoin payments are commercial transactions between businesses settled in dollar-pegged tokens on public blockchains rather than through bank wires, ACH, or SWIFT — settlement compresses from days to seconds, fees fall to single-digit cents on most chains, and the dollar balance becomes programmable, meaning a payment can carry conditions and chain into longer treasury workflows.
This is not a speculative technique. In 2025, B2B stablecoin payments grew 733%, driving the majority of the estimated $390 billion annualized in stablecoin payments volume. Major institutions are routing settlement through stablecoin rails precisely because the settlement finality is unconditional and immediate. USDC settlement allows issuers to benefit from faster funds movement over blockchains, seven-day availability and enhanced operational resilience across weekends and holidays.
The finality problem and why it matters at closing
Every settlement professional understands finality in an intuitive sense: the moment when a deal is actually done and the money cannot come back. In traditional banking, finality is a process, not an event — it accumulates over hours or days as each leg clears, posts, and becomes irrevocable through a chain of institutional confirmations.
Settlement finality — the legal moment when a transfer becomes unconditional and irrevocable — lies at the heart of financial stability. When settlement is slow, uncertain, or exposed to after-the-fact reversals, the system must absorb significant credit, liquidity, and operational risks. Traditional finance has spent decades building safeguards around these vulnerabilities, yet settlement delays, collateral burdens, and infrastructure fragilities persist.
Onchain settlement changes this. Blockchains introduce a fundamentally different settlement model. Atomic settlement enforces simultaneous, conditional exchange: either both sides of a transaction execute, or neither does. When a payment is recorded on Ethereum's canonical chain and reaches finality, it is not merely confirmed — it is mathematically permanent. Settlement finality is the point at which a blockchain transaction becomes irreversible. After finality, the payment cannot be reorganized out of history, double-spent, or unwound by a chain reorg — for treasury teams moving stablecoins between parties, finality is the moment risk leaves the books and cash is truly cash.
That is precisely the property a settlement professional needs at closing. Not "funds should clear in three to five days." Not "subject to correspondent bank confirmation." A confirmed, permanent, auditable record that the payment happened, at a specific timestamp, in specific amounts, to specific addresses.
How onchain routing restructures the multi-currency closing
Here is where the practical mechanics of a tool like shaka.deal become relevant to a settlement professional's workflow.
Shaka.deal is a B2B onchain payment router on Ethereum. It takes a single incoming payment — in a stablecoin such as USDC — and simultaneously distributes it to every party at preset percentage shares, in one transaction, with immediate finality. It is non-custodial: it routes, it never holds funds. The money does not sit in a pool waiting for a disbursement instruction. It moves in one atomic operation from the payer to every recipient at once.
For a settlement professional managing a cross-currency deal, this changes the geometry of the problem at the routing stage. Consider how it restructures the warehouse portfolio scenario from Scenario 1 above.
Instead of the US fund wiring USD to a trust account, waiting for conversion, and issuing four sequential disbursement instructions over multiple days, the settlement can be structured as follows:
- Convert the deal amount to USDCThe fund's treasury converts the deal amount to USDC on-chain — a single operation that takes seconds and produces a precise dollar-pegged amount with no FX spread at this stage.
- Set the distributionThe closing attorney or settlement agent loads the deal into shaka.deal, setting the preset distribution: 84.2% to the Australian vendor, 8.3% to the title agent, 4.0% to the Singapore broker, 2.5% to the US financial advisor, 1.0% to the US legal team.
- Send one paymentThe fund sends one USDC payment to the router.
- Everyone is paid in the same transactionIn the same Ethereum transaction, all five payees receive their USDC simultaneously. There is no sequencing. There is no "waiting for the first leg before sending the second." It is one payment, one block, one timestamp.
Each recipient then handles their own final-mile conversion from USDC to their local currency through whatever arrangement suits their treasury — whether that is an on-ramp service, a domestic exchange, or a bank that supports stablecoin deposits. Stablecoins are a complementary settlement option — businesses can choose the optimal rail for each transaction, including SWIFT, local rails, push-to-card, or stablecoin settlement.
The settlement professional's exposure is compressed from five days to one transaction. The audit trail is on a public ledger — every recipient can verify their payment independently, without waiting for a bank confirmation letter. The attorney's disbursement file is a transaction hash, not a stack of SWIFT receipts.
Solving the "who bears the conversion?" question
One of the most persistent sources of friction in multi-currency deals is the question of who bears the FX conversion cost — and who is exposed to the rate movement. When the settlement agent converts at a single moment, the FX cost is socialised across the deal. When each payee converts individually, the FX cost is individualised.
Onchain routing enables a cleaner answer: settlement happens in a neutral unit, and conversion is each party's decision, at their own timing. USDC is pegged to USD, so every recipient knows exactly how many dollars they have received. The Australian vendor can convert to AUD at a time of their choosing, on a platform with transparent rates, without the conversion being bundled into the settlement event itself. The Singapore broker can hold USDC and convert when SGD rates are favorable. The US attorney can sweep USDC directly to their business account.
This separates two functions that traditional settlement conflates: distribution (who gets what share) and denomination (what currency they end up with). Shaka.deal handles the distribution — precisely, simultaneously, finally. The denomination question is resolved independently by each party, using whatever FX arrangement they prefer.
Structural currency mismatches related to funding and global operations are an inherent aspect of international businesses that cannot be entirely eliminated. Many organizations effectively mitigate their impacts through strategic financial management techniques such as exposure netting, hedging or currency diversification. When routing is handled onchain, the settlement professional can tell each party: you will receive your USDC at the exact moment of closing. What you do with it afterwards is your treasury decision, not a dependency of settlement.
Practical implementation questions for settlement professionals
If a closing attorney or OTC desk is considering onchain routing as part of their multi-currency workflow, several practical questions arise.
Who holds the USDC at the moment of settlement?
No one holds it — that is the point. Shaka.deal routes but never holds. The USDC travels from the payer's wallet directly to each payee's wallet in one atomic transaction. There is no custodian, no pool, no intermediate account where funds rest.
How does this work with existing trust accounting obligations?
This is a jurisdiction-specific question that each attorney and escrow officer must address with their bar counsel or regulatory body. In many structures, the onchain settlement replaces the disbursement stage — the trust account receives USD, converts to USDC for routing, and each payee receives USDC simultaneously. The trust account never holds crypto; the USDC conversion happens at disbursement. This is an evolving regulatory area, and the US GENIUS Act, enacted in 2025, establishes a federal framework for stablecoin issuance, creating the regulatory clarity that institutional participants require.
What about parties who have never touched a crypto wallet?
This is increasingly less of a barrier. Blockchain and DLT continue to evolve beyond cryptocurrency hype to provide solutions for near-instant settlement — platforms built on DLT offer peer-to-peer mechanisms that can bypass traditional correspondent banking routes, resulting in faster transfers. Enterprise-grade custody providers, bank-integrated wallets, and on-ramp services mean that a recipient does not need to be a crypto-native entity to receive USDC. Several banks now offer custodied stablecoin accounts that appear to the recipient as a standard account balance.
Can the distribution shares be adjusted after setup?
That depends on the deal. Shaka.deal's routing configuration is set before the payment arrives, so the shares must reflect the agreed disbursement schedule at the time of setup. For deals with conditional components — an earn-out, a holdback, a commission tied to performance — those legs may be structured as separate routing events triggered by separate payment milestones.
The broader shift in how international settlement is being thought about
The movement toward stablecoin settlement in institutional contexts is not a fringe development. B2B transfers represented nearly 60% of stablecoin payment volume in 2025, accelerating demand for USDC-based B2B payments among fintech platforms and exporters. The G20's cross-border payment roadmap explicitly targets cost below 1% and near-real-time settlement by 2027 as policy goals.
Settlement professionals who understand these mechanics are better positioned to serve clients who are already asking about them. A sophisticated fund buyer, a tech-native vendor, or a cross-border M&A team that has dealt with drawn-out multi-currency closings before will increasingly ask their settlement agent: can we route this onchain?
The answer does not require the professional to become a blockchain engineer. It requires them to understand the settlement layer well enough to structure the deal correctly — who receives what share, in what token, at what address — and to work with a counterparty who can handle the final-mile conversion from USDC to local currency. The closing attorney's expertise remains the governing law, the disbursement instructions, the escrow logic, and the compliance sign-off. The routing is where onchain infrastructure adds certainty.
Closing: what simultaneous actually means
In a deal where each party wants a different currency, the hardest word to deliver on is "simultaneous." When a settlement professional tells a client that everyone will be paid at closing, the implicit meaning of that sentence — in traditional practice — is that everyone will be paid across a window of hours or days that begins at closing and ends when the last wire confirmation arrives.
Atomic settlement is the technical architecture. The practical meaning for a settlement professional is this: the moment the payer's transaction is confirmed on-chain, every recipient has received their share. Not a confirmation message. Not a bank statement that will arrive tomorrow. Actual value, in their wallet, at the same block timestamp.
For the deal where the buyer is in Denver, the seller is in Melbourne, the broker is in Singapore, and the attorney is in New York, "closing" can mean exactly what it says — a single moment of settlement, with all legs complete, verified, and final. The currency each party ultimately transacts in is their own decision. The settlement event itself is not.
That is the promise of onchain routing, and it is the question shaka.deal is built to answer.
