What safeguarding means for your e-money balance

People ask two questions about a wallet balance: "is it real money?" and "what if the company disappears?". Both have precise answers.

E-money is a claim, not a deposit

When a bank takes your deposit it can lend it out; that is how banks create money, as the Bank of England explains in its well-known bulletin. An e-money issuer is different. It may not lend your money. It must hold the funds behind every balance in safeguarding accounts, separate from its own money, so that the balance is always redeemable.

Your BitriPay balance is that kind of claim. It is not a bank deposit, it earns no interest, and it is not covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. It is protected by safeguarding instead.

The one rule

Inside BitriPay's ledger there is a rule that cannot be switched off by an administrator:

Issued e-money must never exceed cleared safeguarded funds, less redemptions in progress and reserved exposure.

Nobody can type an amount into existence. Reserve funding is recorded by one treasury administrator and confirmed by another against the bank statement; issuance requests are checked against the reserve at request time and again when a second person approves them; every step is written to an immutable register.

Daily reconciliation

Each day the platform compares all customer balances with the funds in safeguarding. If they ever fail to match, issuance suspends itself and administrators are alerted loudly. That is also what our auditors and regulators look at.

Balances that are not money

• Promotional credit covers BitriPay fees only. It expires and cannot be sent or withdrawn. Your statement lists it separately.
• Sandbox balances exist in markets where BitriPay is not yet authorised, so people can learn the app. They have no value and the app says so on the balance card.

How to check

Your statement shows the balance type on every page. The regulatory information page lists the issuer and the safeguarding institution for each currency, and the safeguarding of funds page describes the arrangements in full.