Everything that has to be true before you can legally hold a dollar and reliably move it: licenses, accounts, float, and the messaging standard the whole industry is rebuilding around.
Nothing else in the catalog covers the operational and regulatory plumbing that determines whether a money-movement product is even legal or solvent. This is the most "built for practitioners, not beginners" course we offer.
We map the licensing landscape, safeguarding, and the treasury and liquidity model behind a money-movement business, through cross-border, stablecoin corridors, and the ISO 20022 migration the whole industry is on.
Money transmission licensing in the US and Europe, the exemptions that let many products skip it, and a practical test for whether your flow of funds needs a license at all.
When you launch on a sponsor bank instead of getting your own charter, you rent regulated capabilities but inherit a partner who controls the BIN, the funds, and the kill switch. This lesson maps what the bank keeps, what you operate, and where the line that decides your survival actually sits.
A practitioner's map of how customer funds are held off your balance sheet, what pass-through really protects, and the reconciliation discipline that decides whether people get their money back when something breaks.
A builder's guide to the money you cannot see: the float trapped between sender debit and recipient credit, the capital you must park before a payment clears, and the timing gaps that turn a healthy product into a liquidity crunch.
Paying sellers before the underlying sale has settled and cleared its dispute window turns your finance team into an unsecured lender. Here is what that float costs and how to price it.
How money actually crosses borders through nostro/vostro accounts and chains of correspondent banks, and where the fees, FX margin, and delay come from along the way.
A practitioner's map of when a stablecoin leg actually lowers cost and settlement time versus correspondent banking, and the off-ramp and licensing realities that decide whether it works in your corridor.
The global migration from free-text wire messages to structured ISO 20022 data is mostly done, and it changes what your platform can carry, screen, and reconcile. Here is what shipped, what deadlines remain, and what to build for.
Money you authorized rarely arrives exactly as expected, and the gap between your ledger and the settlement file is where unbudgeted operations work lives. This lesson covers how to reconcile a payment stack and how to staff the exception queue before it staffs itself.
How to choose between holding your own license, renting one, or partnering for licensing, accounts, and processing, and how the three decisions interact rather than collapse into one.