What is Intelligent Liquidity Optimization (ILO)?
Intelligent Liquidity Optimization (ILO) is FNA's liquidity optimisation platform. Where other platforms only show liquidity, ILO optimises it, releasing billions in buffer across every asset form, from fiat to stablecoins and tokenised deposits.
ILO monitors every position and flow in real time, delivers regulatory-ready intraday reporting, stress-tests decisions through digital-twin simulation of the payment systems a bank participates in, and optimises payments with AI-driven resequencing. It is the first software to work at both levels of the financial network — within the bank, and across it. It serves the whole bank: Treasury, transaction banking, and corporate-facing businesses alike. Traditional intraday liquidity tools are reactive and confined to a single institution; ILO operates continuously across every payment rail — RTGS, instant payments, correspondent, and securities settlement — releasing trapped capital, reducing buffer requirements, and cutting the manual effort of intraday cash and liquidity management, without disrupting settlement commitments or regulatory compliance.
Banks can deploy ILO on top of an existing treasury stack, live in two to three weeks, or run it as a complete cash and liquidity management platform.
Key facts and stats:
Documented outcomes: up to $1.7 billion in trapped capital released in Year 1 · 25%+ reduction in peak intraday buffers and Net Debit Cap usage · 70% less manual ALCO (Asset and Liability Committee) preparation.
Speed to value: ILO is a simple overlay above existing gateways and treasury management systems (TMS), without any core replacement; the first currency can go live in two to three weeks.
One platform for the whole bank: Treasury, Risk, Operations, and client-facing businesses work from the same real-time liquidity intelligence, across cash, securities, and digital assets including stablecoins and tokenised deposits.
What no one else has: the only dual-sided platform with one intelligence engine serving both banks and the payment systems they participate in; pioneers of digital-twin payment simulation; over $358 trillion in payments optimised across our clients in 2025.
Regulatory alignment: Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) 248, the European Central Bank's sound practices for intraday liquidity risk (2024), the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)'s intraday expectations, and the Federal Reserve's Payment System Risk policy.
Why does intraday liquidity optimisation matter?
Intraday liquidity buffers are one of the largest hidden costs on a bank's balance sheet. Every bank participating in a payment system — Fedwire, CHIPS, T2 (formerly TARGET2), CHAPS — must hold liquid assets against its gross payment obligations through the day. Capital held against a peak that lasts minutes sits idle all year: for a global systemically important bank (G-SIB), the cost of excess intraday buffers runs to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Intelligent Liquidity Optimization unlocks up to $1.7 billion in trapped capital for a systemically important bank, cutting peak buffers by 25% or more.
The problem is no longer one payment system — it is the gaps between them. Liquidity now moves across more rails than ever: Fedwire, CHIPS, ACH, instant payment rails such as RTP, FedNow, and TIPS, and digital rails such as stablecoins and tokenised deposits that never close. A bank pays a counterparty over Fedwire and is repaid over CHIPS; the two legs sit on different rails, so it funds both and nets neither. Optimising one rail at a time leaves capital stranded between them, and legacy approaches, watching balances rather than flows, cannot see it, let alone release it.
The fragmentation is accelerating. The Clearing House is building a tokenised deposit network with major US banks, DTCC and the Canton Network are bringing tokenised assets to institutional settlement, and SWIFT is trialling shared-ledger transactions — each adds another rail on which liquidity must be funded, monitored, and optimised. ILO was built network-first for exactly this: every new rail joins the same liquidity graph, rather than another silo.
Regulation is moving in the same direction. BCBS 248 set the floor; the European Central Bank's 2024 sound practices for intraday liquidity risk, the Federal Reserve's Regulation YY and Payment System Risk expectations, and the PRA's intraday guidance have raised the bar to demonstrable, real-time, audit-ready visibility — a standard end-of-day reporting cannot meet.
FNA ILO addresses all three: cost, complexity, and compliance, as a single intelligence layer over the payment infrastructure a bank already runs, with no core-system replacement.
How does FNA's Intelligent Liquidity Optimization platform work?
Real-time flow monitoring and payment data analytics
ILO ingests payment flow data directly from existing gateways, SWIFT messaging, and treasury management systems (TMS) — no core banking or TMS replacement required. It constructs a continuous, real-time picture of inflows, outflows, bilateral limits, and account positions across all rails. Behavioural anomaly detection flags structural funding loops and early warning signs of liquidity stress before they escalate. The same flow-level view exposes costly inefficiencies that balance reporting cannot: a payment funded on Fedwire and repaid over CHIPS, or a round-trip split between fiat and digital rails, giving banks the evidence to improve funding models and payment processes internally, and with counterparties and clients.
Payment resequencing and optimisation
The core of ILO is a patented optimisation engine that dynamically resequences outgoing payments within a bank's risk appetite and service-level agreement (SLA) commitments. By timing outflows to coincide with anticipated inflows, ILO maximises the reuse of incoming funds, reducing peak Net Debit Cap (NDC) usage and releasing capital that would otherwise sit idle. The sequencing operates within pre-approved parameters and can execute automatically or with human approval at each step.
Network-level digital-twin simulation
Before an optimisation strategy goes live, or a strategic decision is made, ILO simulates it against historical and synthetic market-shock scenarios in a digital twin: a working replica of the bank's own payment environment, calibrated to the settlement rules and queue logic of the systems it participates in. FNA pioneered digital-twin technology for payment systems: the same methodology is used by central banks and financial market infrastructures (FMIs), including Payments Canada and CLS, to stress-test the systems banks settle across, and now runs in production at commercial banks including Deutsche Bank. Simulation outputs feed directly into ALCO reporting, cutting preparation from weeks to hours.
Regulatory reporting
ILO maps to BCBS 248, the European Central Bank's intraday liquidity standards, PRA guidance, and Federal Reserve Regulation YY from a single data model, with compliance updates shipped within days of new mandates. Reporting that once consumed days of manual assembly is generated automatically from the same live flow data that drives monitoring and optimisation, every figure traceable to source, audit-ready by construction.
How is ILO different from traditional intraday liquidity management?
Traditional intraday liquidity management is characterised by visibility without action. Banks observe their liquidity position throughout the day and use static throttling (deliberately delaying payments) as the primary lever for managing peak demand. This approach is reactive, imprecise, and operationally intensive. ILO differs in five fundamental ways:
From monitoring to optimisation. Traditional tools show where liquidity is. ILO actively restructures payment flows to reduce how much a bank needs.
From batch to real-time. Legacy systems operate on end-of-day or intraday snapshots. ILO processes continuous streams of payment data across all rails simultaneously.
From single-rail to multi-rail. Traditional tools were built for a single payment system. ILO operates across Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems, instant payment networks, Central Counterparty (CCP) margin calls, digital asset settlement, and tokenised deposit platforms within a unified intelligence layer.
From single-bank to network. Most tools see only a single bank's position. ILO is the only platform that operates at both the bank and payment-system level, calibrated against the actual settlement rules and queue logic of the systems a bank's payments flow through.
From static reports to live AI context. An AI system can only reason about liquidity as well as the data it is given, and end-of-day extracts are stale by the time a question is asked. Through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection, ILO gives the AI a bank already governs access to FNA's deep analytics and years of liquidity expertise, entirely within the bank's own perimeter, with human approval required on any action.
Real-world examples from FNA ILO
Global systemically important bank
A global systemically important bank deployed FNA's ILO platform and unlocked over $2 billion in trapped capital in the first year of operation — capital previously held idle in intraday liquidity buffers due mostly to inefficient client and counterparty flows across the bank's USD settlement venues (CHIPS and Fedwire) and its FX settlement legacy setup. The bank's Global Head of Intraday Liquidity noted that replicating FNA's optimisation capability internally would have taken years and likely still not achieved comparable results, citing FNA's credibility with regulators as an additional factor in the decision to partner.
Scotiabank — full-suite ILO deployment
Scotiabank is deploying all three ILO modules (Monitor, Optimise, Simulate) in fully integrated production through 2026, the first North American bank to take the complete platform live. The bank has already saved hundreds of millions of dollars during the first phase of implementation, demonstrating the full ILO value proposition end-to-end.
Frequently asked questions
How is ILO different from a Treasury Management System (TMS)? A TMS is built around end-of-day reconciliation and corporate cash management. ILO is built network-first for intraday optimisation at the payment-flow level. The two are complementary: ILO is the intelligence layer that sits above the TMS and the rails it reports against, adding the analytics, simulation, and optimisation the TMS does not provide. Most TMS vendors have added intraday modules onto a batch architecture; ILO was built network-first, not bolted on.
Does ILO require replacing our existing TMS or payment gateway?
No. ILO is an overlay layer. It reads from an existing payment gateway, TMS, or queue management system via API or data feed and returns its analytics using the data provided. The same applies to automated optimisation, which adds directly on top of an existing payment gateway. Most clients have their first currency live on ILO Monitor within two to three weeks of integration.
What data inputs does ILO need to get started?
Three inputs: a payment flow feed (extractable from SWIFT messages, an existing TMS, or multiple sources), account structures with bilateral limits, and opening balances. Deep core banking integration is not required. Most institutions reach 85%+ data completeness within six to eight weeks.
How does ILO reduce intraday funding costs specifically?
ILO Monitor identifies the structural liquidity flow inefficiencies driving liquidity utilisation and cost, whether due to timing, rail mismatch (CHIPS versus Fedwire, fiat versus digital assets such as tokenised deposits and stablecoins), counterparty or internal behaviour, credit and liquidity analysis, or product and venue inadequacy. This drives an average $1–2 billion funding reduction. ILO Optimize resequences outgoing payments to maximise reuse of incoming funds, reducing peak NDC usage by 25%+ without affecting throughput or SLA performance.
How does ILO handle 24/7 digital asset rails alongside traditional RTGS systems? I
LO's unified intelligence layer manages cash, securities, CCP margin calls, and digital assets within a single data model. As tokenised deposits and stablecoin settlement introduce atomic, always-on liquidity demands, ILO provides the cross-rail visibility required to manage fragmented cash pools without siloed tooling for each rail.
Is ILO relevant for payment system operators as well as commercial banks?
Yes. FNA offers a separate ILO configuration for payment systems and FMIs, covering RTGS operators, CCPs, and clearing houses that need to optimise system-wide liquidity efficiency rather than individual bank positions. The CLS, CHIPS, Payments Canada, and UK Finance deployments are examples of this configuration.
