Prerequisites:
- What you own, what we own — the responsibility split,
- an active Wallet Co entity, which must exist before your firm’s API credentials are enabled — see Path to production.
What that leaves you: one pool, one direction
The money structure is the same as the ISV structure, with one identity added.
The flow has exactly one shape: you pre-position your own funds in the pool, then move cash into a participant account with a
Transfer call. The cash stays there. Fills, realized profit, released collateral and settlement credits all land in the participant’s clearing account and become buying power, so nothing needs sweeping after a fill or a settlement.
CashMovementService is firm-scoped — do not send x-participant-id on it. Reasons are DEPOSIT, WITHDRAWAL and VENDOR_FEES, and direction is fixed by the reason. You name only the participant account; we resolve your funding account from your configured relationship. Transfers to your own firm, between participants, or to an external destination are structurally impossible — which is also what keeps you from accidentally building a path that has you holding customer money.
Production deposit rails are wire only as of August 2026.
Wallet Co segregation
You carry a Wallet Co segregation requirement on top of the entity itself. The pool you fund is your own money, and it has to stay distinguishable from anything of your customers’ that you are not permitted to hold in the first place.The omnibus question
An omnibus account at our DCO is possible for licensed intermediaries. An ISV cannot hold one at all. Those two statements are the entirety of the recorded position, and neither of them approves a particular structure. The related fact you can rely on is narrower and still useful: the transfer surface cannot move money to your firm or to an external destination. Whatever structure is eventually approved, it will not be reachable by pointingTransfer somewhere new.
Precision, and why your balance sheet will not reach zero
Transfers accept at most 2 decimal places. Balances carry more —172.395 and 1377.57275 have both been observed.
Which balance number is which
GetAccountBalance returns balance, capitalRequirement, excessCapital, buyingPower, unsettledFunds and marginRequirement. Two partners independently asked which one is spendable cash, and the definition has been given three different ways across three of our own pages.
Two more facts that bite on the reporting side:
GetAccountBalancereturnsInvalidArgument: invalid accountfor a participant clearing account while succeeding for a firm account. Partners derive the number from the newest balance-ledger entry’safterBalanceinstead — a ledger scan standing in for a one-field read.- Whether an open short carries a collateral requirement, and where it is exposed, is unanswered. An open short carries an obligation of up to $1.00 per contract, and
balance_reservationandmargin_requirementcame back empty on the ledger entries for one.
What can go wrong
Where the mechanics live
The calls themselves are identical for an ISV and an IB, so they are not restated here:- Move cash —
CashMovementService, the reason-fixed direction, the four statuses, idempotency and the two-decimal limit. - Which number is spendable — the six balance fields and which one gates a withdrawal.
- The sub-cent residue is a reporting problem for you, not only a reconciliation annoyance — see Reporting pack.
- Hold back $1.00 per open short contract in your own model and say so in your risk-monitoring overview. Whether an open short carries a collateral requirement on our side, and where it is exposed, is unanswered.