Section 04
Where the evidence is weak
Nine things this work does not establish, and seven occasions on which it corrected itself. Both belong here — before any conclusion of ours — because they change how much weight the conclusions can carry.
Why this section exists, and why it is here
Most analysis puts its caveats at the end, in smaller type, after the reader has already formed a view. That ordering is a choice about who the document is for. This one is placed before our conclusions because a reader who is going to disagree with us should have the ammunition first.
There are two different things in here and they should not be confused. A gap is a question we could not answer, recorded as unanswered rather than filled with a plausible estimate. A correction is something we published and later found to be wrong. The second kind is more uncomfortable to write down and more useful to read.
What is not established
Each of these was left open deliberately. In every case the alternative was to produce a number by judgement and present it alongside measured ones, which is how research quietly becomes opinion.
| The question | Why it is open | Findings resting on it |
|---|---|---|
| End-to-end settlement time distribution on a live corridor | we decided not to measure it | 5 |
| Banking-access fragility of ramps and issuers | work is commissioned or under way | — |
| VoP non-match rate (EEA) | nobody publishes it | 1 |
| Per-PSP SEPA value limits | nobody publishes it | 2 |
| Real (not list) pricing from counterparties | only a counterparty conversation closes it | 3 |
| Exit comparables for a sub-scale orchestrator | nobody publishes it | — |
| Can weekend prefunding be structured through a TARGET account type excluded from the holding cap? | needs a legal opinion, not more research | 1 |
| No dispersion evidence above €10,000, which is where B2B lives | only a counterparty conversation closes it | 4 |
| The frontier firm's marginal cost per corridor, which sets the ceiling on what we can ever charge | nobody publishes it | 9 |
Three of these matter more than the rest, and they share a property: no amount of further desk research will close any of them.
Nobody will tell us their real prices. Every counterparty price in this work is a published list price or a secondary estimate. Real terms are negotiated and confidential. That caps the confidence of any cost model built from public inputs — including ours.
We never measured how long a payment actually takes. The end-to-end distribution on a live corridor — not the average, the tail — was deliberately not measured. That was a decision rather than an oversight, and it is an awkward one, because the product this work ends up recommending is a guarantee about timing. We are proposing to price a risk whose distribution we chose not to observe.
The evidence above business ticket sizes is thin and recent. Nearly all measured price dispersion was gathered at retail sizes. A later exercise did measure European pairs at €100,000 and €1m and found dispersion widens with size — but against a single cheap provider rather than a competitive field, which is a different thing entirely.
Where this work corrected itself
Seven corrections were made, each caught by checking one piece of research against another rather than by anyone reviewing it from outside. They are listed because a reader who encounters a superseded figure elsewhere — in an earlier document, or in a conversation — should be able to see that it was superseded and why.
| What was wrong | How it was caught |
|---|---|
| Panel instrument validated. Fault real, narrower than feared, one corridor lost. | checked against a primary source |
| ECB "peak value" definition for the non-bank PSP maximum holding amount | checked against a primary source |
| "The EU stablecoin leg has no failover" — corrected to "thin, not absent" | checked against a primary source |
| C7's basis-point conversion was wrong by 10× throughout | cross-checked against another finding |
| "CLS-deliverable ⇒ the conversion is ownable" is wrong. Restated as three conditions. | checked against a primary source |
| G8 is partially closed, and the evidence went the way nobody predicted | checked against a primary source |
| The Philippines was never routable on the screen the shortlist claimed to use | checked against a primary source |
| A cost-per-transaction figure was converted to basis points wrongly, by a factor of ten | arithmetic re-derived while being reused |
| A prefunding cost table was wrong by a factor of ten, and contradicted itself | later rows disagreed with earlier rows in the same table |
| Rail ownership was read as causing higher margins; it does the opposite | a firm that owns the most rails was found to charge the least |
Two of those changed conclusions rather than just numbers. The corrected deliverability rule removed a corridor from consideration and added three conditions to a test that had been stated with one. The corrected screen removed a corridor from the shortlist that had been ranked into it on the wrong measure — a corridor that separate licensing work had already ruled out for an unrelated reason.
Figures that circulate in this market and should not be used
Three numbers appear repeatedly in industry material and do not survive checking.
A widely-quoted cost-and-speed baseline for business cross-border payments turns out to be consumer remittance pricing, misattributed — roughly four times the measured business figure. Anyone quoting it in a room with a payments professional will be corrected.
Every vendor claim of approval-rate uplift found during this work was unaudited, without exception. The category has been making the same claim for fifteen years without producing an independent measurement of it.
And arguments built on emerging-market currency-control spreads are three years stale. The gaps those arguments depend on have largely closed — in the largest case from tens of per cent to low single digits.