During financial crises, liquidity tends to become scarce, a problem that disproportionately affects small companies. This paper shows that obligation-clearing is a very effective liquidity-saving method for providing relief in the trade credit market and, therefore, on the supply-side or productive part of the economy. The paper also demonstrates that when used in conjunction with a complementary currency system such as mutual credit as a liquidity source the effectiveness of obligation-clearing can be doubled. Real data from the Sardex mutual credit system show a reduction of net internal debt of the obligation network of approximately 25% when obligation-clearing is used by itself and of 50% when it is used together with mutual credit. These instruments are also relevant from the point of view of risk mitigation for lenders, based in part on the information on individual companies that the mutual credit circuit manager can provide to banks (upon the circuit member’s request) and in part on the relief that liquidity-saving provides especially to NPL companies. The paper concludes by outlining recommendations for how even greater savings could be achieved by including the tax authority as another node in the obligation network.

The increasingly complex economic and financial environment in which we live makes the management of liquidity in payment systems and the economy in general a persistent challenge. New technologies make it possible to address this challenge through alternative solutions that complement and strengthen existing payment systems. For example, interbank balancing and clearing methods (such as real-time gross settlement) can also be applied to private payments, complementary currencies, and trade credit clearing to provide better liquidity and risk management. The paper defines the concept of a balanced payment system mathematically and demonstrates the effects of balancing on a few small examples. It then derives the construction of a balanced payment subsystem that can be settled in full and therefore that can be removed in toto to achieve debt reduction and payment gridlock resolution. Using well-known results from graph theory, the main output of the paper is the proof—for the general formulation of a payment system with an arbitrary number of liquidity sources—that the amount of liquidity saved is maximum, along with a detailed discussion of the practical steps that a lending institution can take to provide different levels of service subject to the constraints of available liquidity and its own cap on total overdraft exposure. From an applied mathematics point of view, the original contribution of the paper is two-fold: (1) the introduction of a liquidity node with a store of value function in obligation-clearing; and (2) the demonstration that the case with one or more liquidity sources can be solved with the same mathematical machinery that is used for obligation-clearing without liquidity. The clearing and balancing methods presented are based on the experience of a specific application (Tetris Core Technologies), whose wider adoption in the trade credit market could contribute to the financial stability of the whole economy and a better management of liquidity and risk overall.

The increasingly complex economic and financial environment in which we live makes the management of liquidity in payment systems and the economy in general a persistent challenge. New technologies are making it possible to address this challenge through alternative solutions that complement and strengthen existing payment systems. For example, the interbank balancing method can also be applied to private payment systems, complementary currencies, and trade credit clearing systems to provide better liquidity and risk management. In this paper we introduce the concept of a balanced payment system and demonstrate the effects of balancing on a small example. We show how to construct a balanced payment subsystem that can be settled in full and, therefore, that can be removed from the payment system to achieve liquidity-saving and payments gridlock resolution. We also briefly introduce a generalization of a payment system and of the method to balance it in the form of a specific application (Tetris Core Technologies), whose wider adoption could contribute to the financial stability of and better management of liquidity and risk for the whole economy.

The paper addresses the late payment problem in B2B networks by multilateral set-off of mutual debts. It introduces as innovations in accounting 1) future commitments in addition to existing obligations and 2) a new notation to represent balance sheet relationships as net- work edges. It builds on them to develop 3) the concept of multilateral settlement flow as an innovation in the payment system. These innovations, in turn, lead to significant finan- cial innovations: 4) payment system neutrality, 5) monetary and financial expression, and 6) interoperability between non-convertible currencies. The paper asks two linked research questions: whether these innovations can increase a) the macroeconomic impact of local cur- rencies, and b) the ability of economic systems to meet sustainability expectations. A positive answer to both questions is argued through a “toy model” of a network. We also simulated the presence of clusters of companies transacting with inside money based on a dataset of more than 40,000 companies. Up to 95% of the total Net Internal Debt can be settled within the communities, with the remainder settled with outside money. The implication is that communities with sufficiently high internal trust will be able to use their own inside money and, therefore, to interact economically and financially with other communities and the fiat economy from a position of greater market power. Similarly, the expression of financial rela- tions such as p2p loans implies the ability to take charge of their financial needs with lower reliance on extractive third parties operating in outside money.