Announcing Support for Signet Network

For the past couple months, we’ve been working on adding support for a new payment type for customers of Signature Bank NY. This new payment settles in real time, and is powered by Signature Bank’s private blockchain. In order to support Signature Bank’s internal payment network, Signet, we first developed a solution to represent wallets within Modern Treasury. Our goal was to provide a consistent experience to our customers when interacting with wallets, their existing accounts, and when originating payments.

Today, we’re proud to announce that Modern Treasury has added wallet support to our Internal and External accounts to allow customers to view transactions, balances, and originate payments on the wallet’s network.

What are Wallets?

Wallets can be quite similar to traditional accounts, with certain key differences depending on the network that powers the wallet. One important difference is that wallets can typically only interact with other wallets on the same network. For example, a Bitcoin (BTC) wallet cannot send BTC to a Signet or Ethereum (ETH) wallet.

Another difference is that wallets typically have an “on-ramp” and “off-ramp” to move funds between the wallet and a traditional account. For example, Signet wallets must be linked to a demand deposit account (DDA) at Signature Bank to deposit and withdraw funds from the wallet. Similarly, an exchange may let users purchase a currency (e.g. BTC) using their bank account to fund a crypto wallet. While this may introduce additional money movements, the benefit of wallets is that payments between wallets typically settle in real-time, significantly faster than traditional payment methods like ACH or Wire.

Wallets in Modern Treasury

Wallets in Modern Treasury are represented as either an internal_account or external_account.

Instead of introducing a new model to represent a wallet, we chose to add a new type of account number to describe a ”wallet_address”. Wallets owned or controlled by the Organization should be onboarded as Internal Accounts. These wallets will automatically receive Account Balances, Transactions, Incoming Payment Details from the wallets’ network, and reconcile Payment Orders.

Wallets for Counterparties should be created as External Accounts. These wallets may represent the Organization’s users or parties that the Organization would like to pay.

Wallets that are part of a bank’s proprietary network (e.g. Signet) are usually paired with another Internal Account representing the corresponding DDA.

Supported Wallets and Networks

Modern Treasury is excited to launch wallets with support for Signature Bank’s Signet payment network, with more networks coming soon. To get started using Signet, check out our Signet payment guide and API examples. To learn more about Signet and wallet payments, you can talk to one of our payments advisors, or reach out to your CSM. If you’re interested in the problems we’re solving, join our Engineering team.