Where the time actually goes
A cross-border payment rarely spends its time in transit. It spends it in reconciliation. Each correspondent in the chain adds a step where two institutions must agree on what happened, plus a cut-off window during which nothing moves at all.
Every hop also adds a point at which the two sides' books disagree until someone resolves the difference. The delay is the cost of that disagreement, not of moving the value.
Settlement as a property of the transfer
When value moves directly between counterparties on Rubix, finality is a property of the transfer rather than of a later batch. There is no interval in which one side considers the payment sent and the other does not consider it received.
Reconciliation is what you do when two records might disagree. One record removes the question.
The audit position
Each token carries its own ownership and movement record, so the trail is intrinsic rather than assembled after the fact from two institutions' separate ledgers. An auditor can walk the chain of a specific token rather than reconciling two views of it.
No network transaction fee is levied against the transfer, which changes the economics of high-frequency and low-value corridors more than it changes any single large payment.
What this case study does not cover
Regulatory reporting, sanctions screening and liquidity management are unchanged by the settlement rail and remain the institution's responsibility. Faster settlement narrows the window in which those controls operate, which is an operational consideration rather than a protocol one.