That's a pretty interesting solution to a pretty interesting problem. This happens all the time in the physical commodities markets - you insert or remove a doc

That's a pretty interesting solution to a pretty interesting problem. This happens all the time in the physical commodities markets - you insert or remove a document required to make payment on a letter of credit, shorten the time windows for payment, try to get the counterparty to pay for external costs (insurance, port agents, bunkers, fines, and an entire department just for this type of thing as it concerns demurrage), and so on. So the problem is obviously there, and believe it or not, even among the least tech-savvy everybody is aware of this problem, how it's done, and current methods to minimize it. It's very important. For example, look at Vitol, the biggest energy trading house in the world (followed by Glencore and Trafigura, both split from the same company). This doesn't include metals or ags. Vitol has $300 billion or so in revenue per year. Strictly looking at their trading business, and considering minimum wholesale volumes around 25,000 barrel lots (barge sizes in the Gulf Coast), so wholesale crude and products trades in blocks worth between $1.5 and $2 million at today's prices. While this is an extremely simplified, ballpark analysis, assuming their trading business has a 2% net margin, they're selling $300 billion that they bought for $294 billion. Roughly, that's about 300,000 transactions for separate, physical movements of petroleum and products. Saving even a few days on payment terms across the board would mean they have to borrow money for a few less days, which would add up to millions of dollars in cash savings that begin to accrue immediately and continue to daily over time. So, again, the problem is there, and various groups have attempted to build software (which actually did work, technically). The big problem is that implementation of these tools has been tried in areas such as Letters of Credit (negotiation between counterparties and banks for each one if doing transactional trade finance) and the rest of trade finance. The problem isn't the tools, it's that the companies kind of like to play this game, because if you see yourself as on the more sophisticated end of the market then this benefits you, and this system is tried and true, whereas the new system could be prone to errors or other unknown unknowns, where they don't know how to protect themselves. edit: By the way, much of the above (especially as it concerns the individual specifications of each order, either physical variables in the commodities markets or financial variables in the bond and derivatives markets) is exactly the reason implementation of more streamlined alternatives for clearing and settlement have been so slow. It's not that the technology for actually doing it isn't there, it's that the bottlenecks leading up to that are still there. So if you have a good way for traders to automatically decide which fees and costs apply when and to who, please do tell, but then you've effectively automated the traders, as much of what they do is negotiating those terms.