FNA Sampo coordinates when the banks in a cohort submit their large-value payments, so that each bank funds a lower intraday peak without changing what it pays, whom it pays, or who decides when it submits.
This document describes Sampo's intended target operating model for banks. The supporting results currently come from a synthetic validation environment; they demonstrate the mechanism and inform pilot design, but do not represent production performance or a forecast of any bank's outcome.
The proposition: measure whether Sampo's payment schedule can reduce your modeled in-scope peak net debit, without changing payment amounts, counterparties, rail choice, settlement finality, or your authority to submit.
The problem
Fedwire settles about $4.6 trillion a day and runs no coordinating mechanism. More than half that value settles in the final third of the day, because each bank waits for incoming funds before submitting its own payments. The peak a bank funds is therefore larger than its payment obligations require: part of it exists only because submission times are uncoordinated. Liquidity here is not scarce; its use is uncoordinated.
No bank can capture this alone. The saving is a network property (incoming payments that, submitted in a better order, fund your outgoing ones instead of your own balances and collateral), so no single bank acting alone can measure or realize it.
What Sampo does
Sampo issues confidential, non-binding advice for a bank's own eligible payments, those above an agreed value threshold. Each bank sends payment intents (the amount, counterparty bank, priority, earliest time and own time of a payment it will make; not payment instructions) from its own payment system or intraday-liquidity system. In Sampo's design, independent compute parties compute the payment schedule together, and each sees only shares of the amounts. In that design, no single party recovers a payment amount or the liquidity position derived from it. Each bank receives advice for its own payments only, and Fedwire settles every payment gross and in full, unchanged.
What the bank retains
- Submission authority. Sampo never submits or holds a payment. Every submission remains the bank's own act through its existing systems.
- Customer data. Sampo receives each payment's amount, counterparty bank, priority and time window. Customer data and personal information stay with the bank. Sampo advises on timing only, and never later than the payment's own time.
- The settlement relationship. Sampo takes no part in settlement, holds no funds, and cannot block or delay Fedwire settlement. Finality is central-bank money on the existing rail, exactly as today.
- The ability to bypass. A bank need not follow any advice; it can self-fund under its own controls, or stop sending payment intents, at any time, without operational dependency on Sampo.
What the evidence shows
On a Fedwire-referenced synthetic model of a five-bank core, Sampo's payment schedule reduces the cohort monthly peak net debit (modeled, in scope) by 49.3%, about $55.4bn on the modeled book. It is synthetic: it demonstrates the mechanism and sizes the pilot, and it is not a forecast of any bank's outcome. Sampo's no-worse-off guard aims to reduce the risk that a bank is worse off: that its realised peak net debit with Sampo ends above its peak without Sampo. It is not a guarantee. The production precedent for the mechanism class is CHAPS, where the liquidity-saving mechanism cut settlement banks' intraday liquidity requirement by roughly 20%, about £4bn a day, with no loss of throughput. The gridlock-resolution algorithm underlying that class of mechanism was formalized by Bech and Soramäki (2001) in Gridlock Resolution in Interbank Payment Systems.
A lower modeled peak does not automatically release a regulatory buffer, HQLA or capital, and we make no such claim. What a reduction is worth depends on your own recognition methodology and your cost of liquidity, an annual rate, both of which are yours rather than ours. Data and methodology sets out how the modeled figure is measured and what the model leaves out.
How your bank validates this
An evidence pilot measures the opportunity on your own flows:
- FNA replays your agreed in-scope historical or shadow flows.
- FNA compares your peak without Sampo with your peak with Sampo, under an agreed measurement convention.
- Test adherence and exception scenarios, including the days coordination helps least.
- Apply your own liquidity, internal liquidity stress testing (ILST), funds-transfer-pricing and regulatory methodology to any reduction.
- Decide whether the measured opportunity justifies advisory production.
You get your own bank's figure across the sample, not a network average and not our number applied to you. If it is not material for you, you learn that early and cheaply.
The next step
Agree the scope and success criteria for an evidence pilot: which payments are in scope, the measurement convention, the adherence assumption, and the threshold at which a measured result justifies going further. Moving to live operation on real data is a separate step, with its own approval.