Modern payment systems are frequently described as enabling real-time and final settlement. While this description is technically accurate, it is regulatorily incomplete.Anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions enforcement, and fraud prevention introduce a persistent possibility of post-execution intervention. As a result, the economic out-come of a transaction remains uncertain even after its technical completion. This paper develops a structural framework distinguishing between execution andcompliance closure. It introduces the concept of conditional settlement finality and shows that it arises across all major payment architectures, including correspondentbanking, instant payment systems, and stablecoin-based infrastructures. The analysis demonstrates that improvements in execution speed do not eliminate uncertainty. In-stead, they relocate it into the compliance layer. Settlement finality is therefore not an intrinsic system property, but a contingent state dependent on the closure of regulatory processes.
Miloslav Grundmann (Thu,) studied this question.