# How to settle an international deal without multiple banks in the middle How a cross-border deal settles directly between the two parties, why fewer hops means faster and cheaper, and how it completes. --- ## How to settle an international deal without multiple banks in the middle When a cross-border deal closes, the professional who structured it faces a question that never appears in the term sheet: how does the money actually get where it needs to go, and how many hands will touch it along the way? For brokers, advisors, closing attorneys, and dealmakers operating across borders, payment settlement is not an afterthought — it is the final test of everything they negotiated. The correspondent banking chain that sits between a signed agreement and a funded wallet is invisible until it isn't, and when it fails — when a wire goes silent, when a hop holds for compliance review, when a beneficiary calls asking where their money is — the deal that closed cleanly on paper is very much still open in practice. This article breaks down exactly what that chain looks like, why its structure produces friction, and how direct settlement removes most of it without changing who does the deal. ## What the correspondent banking chain actually is Most professionals who move money across borders know the basics: you wire from one account, and it arrives — eventually — in another. What happens between those two endpoints is less visible but critically important to understand if you want to control the outcome. A correspondent bank is an intermediary party that typically facilitates money transfers between domestic and foreign banks. Most community banks and credit unions don't have the infrastructure to support direct international transactions, so they contract with correspondent banks to handle cross-border settlement. This is not an edge case. It is the default for the vast majority of international wires initiated by professional deal teams. The structure compounds. An intermediary bank is often inserted into the flow when the correspondent bank doesn't have a direct relationship with the beneficiary bank — it acts as a bridge between institutions to move funds along the chain. In some cases, the beneficiary bank has its own intermediary, further complicating the payment path. What begins as a straightforward instruction from a seller's attorney or a closing agent becomes a relay race with three, four, sometimes five institutions each receiving, validating, and forwarding the payment before it reaches the destination wallet. International payments must bridge differences in time zones, currencies, and regulations, which is why international transfers often take longer and cost more, even when the transaction itself is straightforward. For a professional whose reputation is bound up in clean execution, "the wire is on its way" is not a satisfying answer when a counterpart on a different continent is waiting on funds to complete their side of the deal. ## The structure of a typical multi-hop international wire To understand where things go wrong, you need to understand where the hops occur. Take a deal closing in the UAE where the seller banks locally, the buyer is sending USD from a U.S. regional bank, and a third-party advisor in London needs to receive a share. The U.S. regional bank initiates a SWIFT message. Your bank creates a payment instruction — typically an MT103 message — that routes through the SWIFT network to the recipient's bank, settling through correspondent banking relationships in one to five business days. Along the way: intermediary banks in the SWIFT network each add processing time, with every hop potentially adding 24 hours to the total timeline. In a three-party scenario like the one above, you are not running one wire — you are running three, each through its own correspondent chain. The advisor in London may not be in the same currency corridor as the seller in Dubai. Each leg is priced, routed, and timed independently. AML and sanctions screening are applied by each institution in the chain independently. A payment flagged at the correspondent bank level may sit for days without your bank even knowing why. You file an investigation request. The investigation takes time. Meanwhile, your counterpart is waiting. For a closing attorney disbursing proceeds on a $3M commercial property in a market where title transfers upon confirmation of funds, a four-day hold at a correspondent bank is not a minor inconvenience — it is a legal and contractual exposure. SWIFT transfer fees typically range from $25 to $50 for sending, $10 to $20 for receiving, plus $10 to $30 per intermediary bank involved. Multiply that across a multi-party disbursement — seller, listing agent, buyer's agent, and a co-broker in a third country — and the arithmetic becomes real. More importantly for the professional: when each leg is a separate wire, each leg is a separate failure point. Confirmations trickle in at different times. Reconciliation happens after the fact. And if a figure doesn't land correctly, unpicking which hop caused the shortfall is a multi-day exercise. ## Why the chain exists and why it matters to your profession The correspondent banking infrastructure is not an accident. Internationally there is no common and widely available settlement asset. Banks must rely on foreign banks to access foreign central bank money via nostro and vostro accounts. This is the architecture underneath every traditional international payment, whether it is a $50,000 advisory fee or a $50 million acquisition disbursement. It is why banks and their customers can access financial services in different jurisdictions and provide cross-border payment services, supporting, among other things, international trade. For the professionals who structure cross-border transactions, this matters in several concrete ways. **Control disappears at the first hop.** Once a wire leaves your originating bank, it enters an opaque chain where each institution makes its own timing, compliance, and routing decisions. Once the SWIFT message reaches the recipient bank, your payment enters that bank's internal processing queue, which is fully outside SWIFT's control. You can see the message was delivered via tracking — what happens next is opaque. **Split disbursements multiply the risk.** A deal with multiple payees — a listing broker, a co-broker, a transaction coordinator, a referral partner overseas — typically requires separate wire instructions per recipient. Each one is a separate trip through the correspondent chain. Each one can fail, delay, or arrive short of the expected amount because a hop deducted its fee from the principal before passing it along. Each hop in the chain may deduct a fee from the principal amount before passing it along. **Currency introduces another variable.** Cross-border transactions usually require that an agent in the payment chain make the conversion across currencies. In many cases, this implies risks and high costs, which are among the main drivers of cross-border transaction costs. If a broker in the Netherlands is receiving EUR while the deal priced in USD, the rate applied at each conversion point may not be the rate that was agreed upon — or even one that was disclosed before the payment moved. **Timing creates legal exposure.** A deal that closes with funded confirmation on a specific date has a paper trail that must match reality. If funds arrive three days late because of correspondent bank holds, any contractual provisions tied to settlement date are suddenly in play. For closing attorneys in jurisdictions where title or deed transfer is contingent on cleared funds, this is not theoretical risk. ## What "direct settlement" actually means in a cross-border context The phrase "direct settlement" means different things in different contexts. In the traditional banking world, "direct" usually just means the sending bank and the receiving bank have a pre-existing correspondent relationship — no additional intermediary is inserted. Transfers between banks with direct correspondent relationships are faster, often same-day or next-day, while those requiring intermediary banks take longer. That is genuinely better. But it still passes through at least one institution in the middle, and for the payment to reach multiple parties in different countries, you still need to initiate multiple instructions. True direct settlement — in the sense that matters to dealmakers routing to multiple recipients — means value moving from one source to multiple destinations without accumulating hops in between. The reduction in institutional touches is structural, not incidental. On stablecoin rails, the transfer itself collapses to one onchain transaction with finality measured in seconds to minutes. The intermediary chain disappears: a transfer from a buyer's wallet to a supplier's wallet on a major chain is a single state change on the ledger. The key operational consequence for a deal professional is that disbursements to multiple parties — a lead advisor, a co-broker, a local closing attorney — can be handled in one transaction rather than sequenced across individual wires, each carrying its own timing, fee structure, and failure probability. Unlike traditional systems bound by business hours and cutoff times, blockchains operate 24/7/365, allowing payments to move at any time, across any time zone, without delay. For a cross-border deal closing on a Friday afternoon in one jurisdiction where the counterpart is already in Saturday morning, that is not a trivial distinction. ## The mechanics of fewer hops: what changes at each stage To understand the practical difference, it helps to walk through both pathways for the same deal. ### Traditional pathway: a $2M commercial advisory deal closing across three countries The buyer is in Singapore. The seller is in Germany. The lead advisor is in New York. A co-advisor who sourced the buyer is in Hong Kong. The closing attorney is in Germany. Under traditional wire settlement, the disbursement plan calls for four separate payments: the lead advisor's fee in USD, the co-advisor's share in HKD, the closing attorney's fee in EUR, and the seller's net proceeds in EUR. The buyer's Singapore bank initiates. The USD wire to the New York advisor may settle in a day or two if there is a direct correspondent relationship — but may take longer if the Singaporean bank routes through a third-party institution. The HKD wire to Hong Kong follows a separate corridor. The two EUR payments may consolidate if the German bank has SEPA access internally, but the Singapore-to-Germany USD-to-EUR corridor requires a conversion hop. Total: four separate instructions, potentially five to eight business days for all parties to be fully funded, multiple conversion events, and no single confirmation that everyone has landed. The closing attorney is coordinating this by email, chasing confirmations from four different banks across three time zones. ### Fewer-hop pathway: same deal, direct onchain disbursement All four recipients have wallets set up in advance. The buyer's side initiates a single onchain payment instruction. The routing is encoded: 42% to the seller's wallet, 30% to the lead advisor, 18% to the co-advisor, 10% to the closing attorney. One transaction. The intermediary count drops from three to five to one plus an off-ramp partner. Every wallet receives its share in the same block. Stablecoin transactions appear on a shared public ledger, giving both counterparties a consistent view of payment status and finality. This transparency can help shorten reconciliation cycles and reduce operational friction. The closing attorney is no longer chasing four banks. The transaction hash is the receipt. All parties confirm simultaneously. This is where Shaka operates. The deal professional — the broker, the advisor, the closing attorney — sets the recipient wallets and the percentage splits before the deal closes. When the payment comes in, Shaka routes it onchain, splitting automatically across every wallet in one transaction. No sequential wires. No re-consolidation. No chasing confirmations from institutions in multiple jurisdictions. The money lands where it was supposed to land, with a record that does not require a tracer request to verify. ## Where the structure changes depending on deal type Not every cross-border deal has the same settlement exposure. The number of hops that matter — and which ones create the most risk — varies significantly based on deal type, the jurisdictions involved, and the currency structure. ### Real estate Cross-border real estate deals typically involve a listing agent, a buyer's agent (who may be in a different country), sometimes a referral agent who passed the buyer or property to one of the primary brokers, and a closing attorney or notary. Each represents a discrete payment obligation, and in many markets, those payments flow through the closing attorney's account before disbursing outward — meaning the attorney is already running a mini-disbursement operation at close. When any of those recipients are in a different country than the closing jurisdiction, the hop count multiplies immediately. The currency situation in international real estate is particularly complex. A U.S. buyer purchasing in Portugal may wire in USD, but the notary fees and agent commissions are typically in EUR. The buyer's agent, if based in Miami, expects USD. The Portuguese listing agent expects EUR. The conversion event happens at the closing attorney's level, and the rate applied at that moment may vary meaningfully from the rate the buyer saw when they budgeted for the purchase. ### M&A and advisory In cross-border M&A, the disbursement is often simpler in terms of the number of parties at close — but the amounts are larger, and the timing sensitivity is higher because of conditions precedent tied to funding. A $20M transaction where the advisory fee needs to be confirmed received before a post-closing certificate can be issued gives the correspondent chain a way to create real legal delay. Multi-advisor situations — a sell-side advisor in one country, a buy-side advisor in another, a finder who introduced the parties from a third — amplify the problem because "the deal closed" and "everyone got paid" are no longer the same event. ### Structured transactions with co-brokers and referrals The deal structure that creates the most settlement complexity is the one with multiple brokers across multiple jurisdictions, all owed a percentage of a single commission pool. A commercial real estate transaction involving a U.S. listing firm, a co-broker in Dubai who identified the buyer, and a referral fee owed to a Singapore-based agent who introduced the parties can require three separate wires in three separate currency corridors. Each must be tracked. Each produces its own confirmation timeline. And if the co-broker arrangement was not documented with a split agreement before close, the lead broker may be holding all the funds while negotiating who gets what — a position that creates its own fiduciary and relationship risk. The advantage of encoding the split before the deal closes — agreed percentages, committed wallets — is that it removes the post-close negotiation from the equation entirely. Payment becomes an output of the deal structure, not a separate process that has to be managed after the handshake. ## Compliance, finality, and what "cleared" means across borders One of the persistent confusions in international deal settlement is the difference between a payment being sent, being received, and being cleared. In the correspondent chain, those are three different events separated by time, and the definition of "cleared" is jurisdiction-specific. In a jurisdiction where funds must be "available and irrevocable" before title can transfer, the correspondent chain creates a specific problem: a SWIFT confirmation shows the payment left the sending bank, but it does not constitute cleared funds at the receiving bank. SWIFT transfers typically take one to five business days because they rely on correspondent banking relationships — meaning funds may pass through several institutions before reaching the destination bank. Each institution in that chain must receive, validate, and forward the payment, adding processing time at each step. Blockchain payments provide finality because transactions are irreversible, eliminating chargeback risk. For a professional managing a deal with contractual settlement conditions, the distinction between "pending" and "final" is not philosophical — it is what determines whether the conditions precedent have been met. An onchain transaction that has reached finality is, by the nature of the ledger, not reversible. A SWIFT wire that is technically in flight is not final until the beneficiary bank credits it. This matters especially in deals where the seller is releasing a deed, a security interest, or a consent to transfer contingent on confirmed payment. The closing attorney who can point to an immutable ledger record — timestamped, publicly verifiable, not subject to recall — is in a structurally different position than one waiting on a bank confirmation that may or may not reflect cleared funds. Transactions are timestamped and added to an immutable ledger visible to all authorised participants. For reconciliation, audit, and dispute prevention, that record is cleaner than a chain of MT103 messages reconstructed from multiple bank systems across time zones. ## What this means for how you structure the payment before close The professionals who have the most control over settlement outcome are the ones who design the payment structure before the deal closes, not after. The moment you are chasing wires post-close, you have already lost control of the timeline. The correspondent chain operates on its own schedule regardless of your urgency. Designing for direct settlement means making three decisions early: **Agree on the currency of settlement.** If all parties agree that the deal settles in a stablecoin denominated in USD, the FX conversion event is isolated to on-ramp and off-ramp rather than distributed across every hop. The FX hop, if needed, happens once at on-ramp or off-ramp rather than at every correspondent hand-off. For advisors and brokers whose fees are agreed in USD but whose recipients bank in EUR or AED, this removes the most unpredictable element of the disbursement. **Set the split in advance, not in arrears.** A deal that has a co-broker agreement in place before close — with specific percentages, specific recipient wallets — can disburse in one motion. A deal that closes and then figures out how to split is at risk of delay, dispute, and the compounded frustration of parties who know the deal is done but have not yet been paid. **Confirm wallet readiness before the closing date.** Whether recipients are receiving to a bank account or a digital wallet, their payment details should be verified before the day. The worst version of a cross-border closing is one where a recipient's wallet or account information is wrong and the closing has to be held while the correction propagates back through the chain. When a deal professional sets up a Shaka payment link — locking in recipient wallets and percentage splits before the deal closes — those three decisions are embedded in the payment structure itself. When the deal closes, the payment executes as designed: one transaction, all parties funded simultaneously, no sequential chasing. The professional's job is already done. The money lands where the structure said it would land. ## The real professional edge: certainty before close, not speed after There is a tendency to frame direct settlement as a speed story — and it is faster, meaningfully so. But for a broker or advisor working on a deal that took six months to get to close, the urgency is not primarily about saving a few days on a wire. It is about the certainty of outcome at the moment the deal signs. When you have structured a payment correctly — fixed splits, verified wallets, onchain routing — the settlement is no longer a variable. It is not dependent on whether your regional bank has a direct correspondent relationship with a bank in the buyer's jurisdiction. It is not affected by a weekend cutoff in Singapore or a compliance hold at a Frankfurt correspondent. It does not require you to make seven phone calls on closing day to confirm that four different recipients received the right amounts. Deterministic finality means payments complete with certainty rather than lingering in probabilistic "pending" states. That certainty is what the correspondent chain cannot reliably provide, and it is what every professional in a multi-party international deal actually needs at close. The correspondent chain exists to solve a real problem — how to move value across jurisdictions that don't share a common settlement asset — and it solved that problem well enough to support decades of global commerce. But the hop structure it requires introduces a class of risk that is not proportionate to the sophistication of the professionals using it. A dealmaker who can execute a cross-border M&A transaction across three jurisdictions, three currencies, and four co-advisors deserves a payment infrastructure that matches that sophistication. Fewer hops is not a workaround — it is the right structure for a complex deal, and the professionals who adopt it earliest will close with less friction, more certainty, and a cleaner record than those still chasing confirmation emails from correspondent banks on the other side of the world.