When it comes to trade finance, escrow, and high-value B2B transactions, how money is handled behind the scenes matters. A lot.
That’s why at Alethium, we operate with the same discipline, safeguards, and transparency you’d expect from a regulated financial services provider—even though we aren’t one.

Here’s how we keep your money safe, and your mind at ease:

Alethium operates with a Merchant-of-Record structure. That means we’re the legal buyer and seller in each transaction. It’s a model designed for clarity and simplicity. It also means we do not meet the criteria for regulated financial services, but we voluntarily meet those standards anyway.

But here’s the important bit:

We hold these funds in a dedicated platform account, designed to segregate platform-related cash flow from our own business activities.

This is exactly how a regulated entity would do it.

We perform a daily reconciliation of all platform balances and transactions. That means:

This is a core expectation of the FCA’s guidance on safeguarding, and we adhere to it to the letter.

Even though we’re not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), we take our cues from those who are.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

✅ We do all of this, and treat safeguarding as a first-class operational discipline—not a checkbox.

EBA Guidelines on PSD2:

✅ Our approach aligns with these guidelines to ensure funds can never be used for anything other than the user’s intended transaction.

When you use escrow on Alethium, your money is:

This structure ensures that neither buyer nor seller is exposed to unnecessary risk, and that funds flow only when everyone’s satisfied.

Our aim isn’t to avoid regulation—it’s to operate as if we were already regulated, without burdening our users with the overhead. In fact, we hold ourselves to an even higher standard: we’re not just meeting compliance checklists, we’re earning user trust with every transaction. But here’s the added benefit:

💡 We can do this at a fraction of the cost.

Getting a payments services licence takes 9+ months, and typically requires:

By running lean and smart—without compromising on transparency or safety—we’re able to deliver the same high-trust service at significantly lower cost. And those savings get passed directly to our users.

✅ Funds are held in segregated accounts

✅ We reconcile transactions daily

✅ We follow FCA, EBA, and PSD2 guidelines

✅ You stay in control of your money at all times