26. Even where the method of payment is known, a combination of local laws, rules and market practice may affect the timing of finality during value day. For instance, correspondent banks typically have at least some discretion as to when they must credit their beneficiaries with received funds. In addition, correspondents often have discretion as to when they must notify their beneficiaries about such credits. At the same time, in many G-10 countries the act of crediting or notifying the beneficiary of received funds plays an important role in determining the legal finality of those funds. Thus, depending on the circumstances, funds may be received with finality at any time from the early morning hours until the close of business on value day (or, in some cases, the next day).

27. It is worth noting that funds may not become final from the point of view of the beneficiary until several hours - or even days - after the underlying payment instruction can no longer be cancelled unilaterally by the payer. This is most evident in those circumstances in which payment instructions become de facto irrevocable even before they are sent to the local payments system, let alone to the correspondent bank. This situation may also arise when payments are made over net settlement systems. For instance, in most G-10 net settlement systems payers cannot revoke their payment instructions once they have been accepted, yet such payments cannot be considered final by the beneficiary until settlement: until that time the system operator may cancel them in certain circumstances (e.g. in the event of a settlement problem).

28. In addition to understanding when a final payment may be received, in managing settlement risk it is necessary to monitor whether, in fact, a final payment has been received. A bank's process for identifying final and failed receipts may involve one or more of the following steps: the bank's account being credited by its correspondent; the correspondent notifying the bank that its account has been credited; and the bank receiving and processing this information and comparing it against its expected receipts (i.e. the bank's reconciliation process). And, as stated above, the correspondent's act of crediting or notifying its customer may itself play a role in determining the finality of the funds. In addition to its routine reconciliation process, a bank may also be alerted to a failure (or at least a potential failure) to receive expected funds from its counterparty through other means, such as cash management reports of unusually low or overdrawn balances at its correspondent bank, or even through public news sources.

29. Some banks can always identify the final and failed receipt of bought currencies as soon as they are due. Most banks, however, do not identify their daily receipts and fails until one or two days after value day. In some cases a late receipt identification process reflects the fact that correspondents do not send timely information; in the majority of cases, however, banks simply delay processing the information they receive for perceived cost and efficiency reasons. In a few situations, banks consider their trades to be settled before their receipts are final (e.g. in the case of Canadian dollar receipts); in such circumstances banks will underestimate their settlement exposure if they ignore the possibility that such receipts could be revoked or unwound, leaving them at risk to their counterparties.