What we did not examine

Why this is separate from the gaps

The previous section listed things this work tried to establish and could not. Those affect how much weight the conclusions carry. They do not change what the conclusions are about.

This section is different. Each item below is a direction that was never investigated — in most cases because of how the work was sequenced rather than because anyone judged it unimportant. If any of them turns out to matter, it does not weaken the analysis so much as redirect it.

Six of the eight are roughly a week of work each. Two are not research problems at all.

The eight

1. The treasury product, which was deliberately separated out and then dropped

One finding in this work identified a real proposition — repositioning liquidity across a weekend or a bank holiday, when the settlement systems are closed — and noted that it is sold to a treasurer rather than to a payments lead. Different buyer, different budget, different sales conversation, different competitors.

Having correctly separated it, nobody then sized it. It is capped at a few million per pass by the depth of the market it depends on, which makes it small. But small and separate is not the same as unimportant, and it is the only proposition in this work with a buyer who already has a budget line for exactly this problem.

2. Freight, commodities and trade finance

Ranked second on fit by the demand research and never sized. The logic for it is strong: shipments have deadlines with contractual penalties attached, which means a payment arriving late has a cost the buyer can already quantify. That is rare, and it is precisely the condition under which a guarantee about timing can be priced.

The demand work ran out of research budget before reaching it. That is the whole reason it is absent.

3. High-risk and iGaming — the weakest exclusion here

This segment was ranked first on willingness to pay. It is also the one segment whose actual problem is route selection, because providers withdraw from it without notice and operators genuinely need alternatives ready.

It was set aside on a judgement about regulatory and reputational cost that was never sourced, never quantified, and never revisited. Of everything in this section, this is the exclusion least supported by evidence. If the recommendation elsewhere is that the business should sell access where others refuse to go, then declining to examine the segment that pays most for exactly that is difficult to defend.

4. Starting from a currency other than the euro

Every corridor examined begins in euros. That was inherited from how the question was first framed and never decided on its merits.

It matters more than it sounds, because the conversion carries most of the margin and its economics are not symmetric. A dollar-origin book faces different competition, different liquidity and a different regulatory perimeter. The finding that the deep token markets are dollar-denominated — which forces an awkward double conversion for a euro-origin business — simply does not apply to a dollar-origin one.

5. Domestic and intra-European adjacencies

Two proprietary data assets were identified during this work: the rate at which the European payee-verification check returns a mismatch, and the per-institution value limits that replaced the removed scheme cap. Both were noted as things nobody publishes. Neither was sized as a business.

They are unlikely to be businesses on their own. They may be the residue that makes another product defensible, which is a different argument and one nobody made.

6. Acquisition as a strategy rather than as an outcome

This work concludes that acquisition is the probable end state and then plans as though independence were the goal. Those are different plans. Building deliberately for a specific acquirer changes which licences are worth holding, which corridors are worth entering, and which data is worth accumulating.

The evidence for the conclusion is strong — eight transactions in this layer in eighteen months, none paying a premium for routing. The plan that follows from it was never written.

7. Corridors outside the shortlist

Four were added later in response to a challenge that the work was Latin-America-focused: South Africa, the European non-euro pairs, the Gulf and China. Three were rejected on evidence and one was added to the sequence.

That leaves genuine absences — intra-African and other emerging-market to emerging-market corridors, which are non-euro-origin by construction and therefore fall outside the framing in item 4; and several large trade corridors that were never on the list because the list was inherited from a ranking of where correspondent banking fails, which is not the same question as where money can be made.

8. Two costs nobody put in the plan

The product this work recommends depends on accumulating operational data before the product can be sold — you cannot guarantee a delivery time you have never measured. That implies running volume unguaranteed first, at a loss, for some period. Neither the cost of that period nor the working capital it consumes appears in any figure here.

What it would take to open them

Items 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 are each about a week of the same kind of work that produced the rest of this: measurable, and cheap relative to what has already been spent.

Item 3 needs a regulatory and reputational cost opinion before it can be assessed at all, which is a different exercise. Items 6 and 8 are not research — they are planning decisions that need to be made rather than investigated.

None of them was skipped because it was judged unimportant. They were skipped because the work was sequenced to answer one question first, and that question turned out to take all of it.