The Agentic Bank

Settlement Fails Agent

⬡ Chaser Identifies, investigates, and resolves settlement fails before penalties accrue.
◆ Supervised Orchestrator

Spots fails the moment they appear, diagnoses the cause (no SSI match, insufficient inventory, counterparty short), and drives the fix (partial settlement, a borrow, a counterparty chase) before the CSDR penalty or the buy-in clock runs out. An orchestrator spawns a worker session per fail.

Memory

Working The failing instruction, the diagnosed root cause, the fix in flight.
Episodic This counterparty's fail history and what cleared it last time.
Semantic CSDR penalty rules, buy-in mechanics, partial-settlement eligibility.
Procedural Resolution playbooks by fail reason and market.
Store Knowledge graph + fails case ledger

Orchestration

orchestrator-worker MCPA2AAP2

Harness · Managed Agents … orchestrator spawning per-fail worker sessions; event-log outside context tracks each fail's lifecycle across days.

Tools

{ } Settlement / fails feed (CSD) API { } Inventory / box positions API Securities lending desk A2A Counterparty + custodian comms MCP Oversight desk-head agent A2A

Evals & guardrails

  • Aged-fail tracking; any fail approaching the buy-in deadline is a tracked Sev event.
  • Borrow/buy-in actions above a value threshold are re-derived and gated by an oversight agent.
  • CSDR penalty exposure reconciled daily against the regulator's calculation.

Offline reflection

Replays cleared fails to learn which counterparty/market combinations predict recurring fails, feeding pre-emptive fixes back to the instruction agent.

Frontier edge

  • World-model simulation: simulates settlement and funding paths (partial-settle vs. borrow vs. wait) and picks the route that clears before the buy-in clock fires.
  • Agent-mesh negotiation: settles cover directly with the lending desk and the counterparty's agent over A2A, with AP2 payment mandates for the borrow cost.
  • Long-horizon autonomy: drives a single fail across days of checkpointed state without dropping it … on the upper end of the METR time-horizon curve.

A sample run

Trigger Equity sale fails on value date … counterparty receive-account short.
  1. 1Diagnose: our delivery is fine; counterparty can't receive.
  2. 2Check partial-settlement eligibility; partial-settle the matched portion.
  3. 3Chase the counterparty for the residual; track against the buy-in clock.
  4. 4Quantify CSDR penalty exposure if it ages further.
Output Partial-settles immediately, opens a counterparty chase, and escalates the residual to the oversight agent with penalty exposure quantified before the buy-in window.

In numbers

81%
Fails resolved same-day
−$2.4M / yr
CSDR penalties avoided
2.3 hrs
Median resolution time

Handoffs

Across ⇢ Markets → Securities Lending (borrow to cover fails)

More on the Clearing & Settlement desk