Banking
Our bank lost its own banking, and now we have lost ours.
A local bank cannot clear USD or EUR by itself. It holds a nostro account with a large correspondent bank, and that correspondent decides whether the relationship continues. When the correspondent's own risk committee concludes that the local bank's client base (gambling, adult, crypto, or a jurisdiction under increased monitoring) is not worth the exposure, it terminates. The local bank then loses the ability to clear that currency, and the closures cascade downward to the customers who caused the perceived risk.
The pattern is recognisable before the letter arrives. Payment routing changes and settlement slows as the bank moves to a longer chain of intermediaries. Incoming transfers are returned or queried more often. The bank starts requesting documentation it never asked for, restricts certain currencies or destination countries, or quietly stops onboarding the sector. Each of those is the correspondent's pressure showing through.
Concentration is what turns this into an operational failure. A business banking one institution in one jurisdiction has no capacity to absorb the loss, and a customer who arrives at a new bank immediately after a de-risking event is screened against exactly that history.
How LTB Resolves It
LTB assesses the correspondent exposure behind a client's existing banking (which institutions clear its currencies, which jurisdictions and sectors are under pressure, and what the early indicators are showing) and states plainly where the concentration risk sits.
The practice then builds redundancy before it is needed: relationships across more than one institution and more than one jurisdiction, with currency clearing routes that do not share the same correspondent, and a documented file that presents the client's own compliance position as an asset rather than a liability at onboarding. Accounts are opened and cleared by the licensed institutions themselves; LTB confirms appetite, prepares and places the file, and coordinates the transition so settlement is never interrupted.
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