Routing engine
Prices the full end-to-end route across every connected rail, not just the cheapest leg, and picks a winner per payment.
Cross-border settlement, orchestrated
Every payment has more than one way to settle. We pick the right one every time.
Zentra routes each cross-border payment across every connected settlement rail in real time, priced end to end, compliant by design, and fully auditable. We never touch the funds.
Agency model. No client funds held. Regulated execution by licensed partners.
- Fiat inFIAT IN1
- Route decisionROUTE2
- Licensed partner executesEXECUTE3
- SettlementSETTLE4
- Fiat outFIAT OUT5
Route decision is Zentra. Execution and settlement by licensed partners.
Why now
The rails have multiplied. The decision hasn't gotten easier.
Correspondent banking on emerging-market corridors typically costs 2–7% all-in and takes two to five business days, worse across weekends and holiday cut-offs, because value sits pre-funded in nostro accounts and moves through banking-hours-only batch settlement.
Newer settlement rails fix the transfer step, near-instant, 24/7, but the transfer step was never the expensive or slow part. The real cost sits in the on-ramp and off-ramp conversion spreads either side of it, and those vary enormously by provider, corridor and time of day. Comparing one rail's transfer cost to a full correspondent-banking payment is comparing the middle of the sandwich to the whole thing, a comparison sophisticated payments people distrust on sight.
Meanwhile the number of separately-licensed rails is expanding fast, MiCA's transitional window closed in mid-2026, the UK's cryptoasset regime opens its authorisation gateway this year, and new frameworks keep phasing in through 2027. Each newly licensed provider covers different corridors and currencies well. No treasury team can evaluate all of them, per payment, in real time. That evaluation is the product.
2–7%typical all-in cost, EM corridors
2–5 daystypical correspondent settlement time
3–5credible settlement rails per corridor, and rising
How it works
The routing decision, made in real time.
01
Instruction received
Amount, currency pair, corridor and urgency.
02
Full route priced end to end
On-ramp spread, transfer, off-ramp spread and local liquidity, versus the correspondent-banking alternative, adjusted for partner-specific risk (freeze history, chain finality, real-time depeg monitoring).
03
Best route selected and instructed
Zentra sends the instruction to the winning licensed partner. Their systems and their keys execute it. Zentra never holds the funds or the token at any point.
04
Decision logged
Immutable, versioned, reconstructible for audit.
The product
Five things the routing layer does that a single rail can't.
Partner network
Correspondent banks and licensed settlement providers, each verified against their regulatory register and re-verified on a schedule.
Compliance normalization
Travel Rule data carried and translated across partners speaking different protocols, so a payment never stalls on a data mismatch.
Risk intelligence
Freeze-incident history, chain finality rules, and real-time depeg monitoring, priced into every routing decision, not visible to anyone using a single rail directly.
Audit trail
Every routing decision immutable, versioned and reconstructible, built for your auditors and ours.
For partners
Two ways to use Zentra.
Advisory
You already have your own licensed rails. Zentra makes the routing decision as a pure API/data service, you keep execution in-house, we tell you the best route and why.
Execution
You don't have your own rails yet. Zentra routes and executes through its network of licensed partners under an agency model, so you get multi-rail settlement without building or licensing anything yourself.
How we're structured
We never touch the money.
Zentra decides and instructs. It never holds client funds and never holds a settlement account or key of any kind, not in production, not in testing. Every regulated act, the holding of funds, the currency conversion, the scheme settlement, is performed by a licensed partner under their own permissions. Zentra operates as their registered agent.
That's a deliberate structure, not a shortcut. It means every partner in the network is verified against its actual regulatory register before a single payment routes through it, and it means Zentra's incentive is always to find the best rail for your payment, never to keep you on its own.
Built by payments and compliance leadership from Visa, Amazon, Monzo, Barclays, and Deloitte.
Route your next cross-border payment the right way.
Talk to us about your corridors, we'll show you what you're currently leaving on the table.