Settlement float is a design decision

Figo engineering · August 2026

Ask a payments engineer what a collection returns and you get a transaction id. Ask what it costs and you usually get a fee in basis points.

Neither is the expensive part. The expensive part is the gap between the customer paying and that money being yours to move — and in most local collection, that gap is measured in days.

What float actually is

A customer in Lagos sends naira. The money arrives somewhere. Your dashboard says the payment succeeded. And then you wait: one business day, two, three, longer over a weekend or a public holiday, before the balance becomes something you can act on.

During that window the money exists, it is owed to you, and you cannot use it. That is float, and it is not a fee — which is precisely why it stays off the pricing page while quietly costing more than the pricing page does.

It costs in three ways at once. You are carrying an FX position you did not choose, because the amount was fixed in local currency at payment and converts at settlement. You are financing your own payouts, because money you cannot spend has to be covered by working capital you keep parked for the purpose. And you are holding credit risk on whoever is sitting on the funds, for as long as they sit on them.

What we do instead

A collection settles to your dollar balance when the pay-in confirms. Not overnight, not on a release schedule — at the point the money lands.

The mechanism is the stablecoin rail underneath. Settling on it is what makes "when the money confirms" a technically achievable moment rather than an aspiration, because there is no correspondent bank in the middle keeping its own hours.

You never hold the stablecoin and you never touch one. Your balance is in dollars. The rail is how value gets from a naira bank transfer to that balance without a business day in between.

The state that stops existing

This is where it becomes an engineering argument rather than a treasury one.

Build against a floating settlement model and your system grows a distinction between money that has arrived and money that has cleared. That distinction propagates. Now there are two balances. Now there is a release schedule to model, with weekends and holidays per market. Now a payout has to check not just whether the balance is sufficient but whether the available balance is, and a support agent has to be able to explain the difference to a customer who can plainly see that they were paid.

None of that is hard. All of it is permanent. Every feature you build afterwards inherits it.

When the pay-in settles on confirmation, there is one balance. A collection that succeeded is money you can pay out in the same request cycle. The cleared-versus-uncleared concept never enters the codebase, which is the cheapest possible way to handle it.

What it does not remove

Settlement being instant does not make the pay-in instant. You are still waiting on a customer.

A bank collection returns a temporary account and the customer has to actually send the transfer. A mobile-money collection sends a push prompt to a phone that may be face-down on a table. The collection sits at pending until they act, and some never do. That wait is real and no settlement design removes it — which is the subject of one payment or every payment, because the right pay-in shape is mostly a question about how often that customer comes back.

What instant settlement removes is the second wait: the one after the customer has already done their part. The first wait belongs to your customer. The second one was always just infrastructure, and it is the one worth engineering away.

And the rate

One more thing follows from settling at confirmation. The conversion happens then too, which is why a quote taken earlier is indicative rather than fixed — the market between quote and pay-in belongs to nobody. That is its own subject, in a quote is not a lock.

The shorter version: a settlement delay is a position somebody is taking with your money. Removing the delay removes the position.

Collection fields and lifecycle are in the docs. Questions: hi@spendfigo.com.

Common questions

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