Four schemes, four very different operational profiles. A practical decision guide for product teams that need to pick the right rail for the right flow.
Start with three questions
- Direction: are you pushing money out (payout) or pulling it in (collection)?
- Urgency: does the funds-availability latency matter to your product experience?
- Debtor type: is the counterparty a consumer or a business?
The decision tree
For most product teams the answer falls out of three branches:
- Pushing & can wait a day → SCT. Payouts to suppliers, salaries, marketplace seller settlements where T+1 is fine.
- Pushing & needs to be instant → SCT Inst. Customer refunds, marketplace seller payouts where speed is the product, gaming withdrawals, treasury sweeps.
- Pulling from consumers → SDD Core. Subscriptions, utility bills, insurance premiums, gym memberships, recurring SaaS.
- Pulling from businesses → SDD B2B. B2B SaaS invoices, wholesale supply, leasing, any case where the 8-week refund right would kill your unit economics.
Things people get wrong
- Using SDD Core for B2B. The debtor has the refund right — you have the cost. Migrate to B2B mandates the moment a customer is a business.
- Defaulting to SCT Inst for everything. Higher fees, lower per-transaction ceiling, and not every counterparty bank supports it yet (the gap is narrowing but real). Use SCT where the latency genuinely doesn’t matter.
- Treating SCT Inst as irrevocable from second zero. It is — but the rules around recall and confirmation of payee still apply. Build your reconciliation around the actual ACK, not the request.
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