Settlement Factory: Atomic DvP Across Asset Classes
Category:
Factory
Date:
Creator
Osso Team
Delivery-versus-payment sounds simple in principle: cash and securities move together, or neither moves. In practice, DvP across asset classes or across jurisdictions has historically required a trusted intermediary to sequence the two legs correctly.
Atomicity as a contract property
Settlement Factory contracts encode both legs of a DvP transaction into a single atomic unit. Either the cash leg and the securities leg both execute, or the entire transaction reverts — there's no intermediate state where one party has delivered and is waiting on the other.
Why this generalizes across asset classes
Because the factory pattern separates the atomicity logic from the specific asset being settled, the same contract structure that settles a bond-versus-cash trade can settle a repo unwind or a fund share redemption.
What this means for counterparty risk
Removing the sequencing gap removes the specific risk that clearers exist to underwrite. That doesn't make clearers obsolete, but it does give institutions a credible alternative where a central clearer doesn't exist or is prohibitively expensive to access.
