Architecture

Teel is a payment orchestration layer. We aggregate a network of regulated banking and stablecoin partners under a single API, then route each transaction through the partner best suited to the corridor, currency, and rail you’ve selected. This page describes the moving parts at a level that’s useful for risk, compliance, and engineering reviews — without committing to which partner handles any specific corridor (that’s a runtime decision and changes over time as we add new partners).

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High-level architecture

You integrate once with Teel. Underneath, the same payout can route through any of several licensed partners — Teel picks per-transaction based on price, speed, and corridor coverage.

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How funds are orchestrated

Teel does not custody fiat. We are not a bank or a money transmitter, and we never hold partner or recipient funds in a Teel-owned bank account. Every leg of every transaction is executed by a licensed third-party institution under their license, with Teel acting as the orchestration and reconciliation layer. There are three movement patterns the orchestration layer supports:

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Fiat-to-fiat (multi-partner)

The most common partner pattern. Your business sends fiat from your bank account; the recipient receives fiat in theirs. Two licensed partners are involved per transaction — one regulated to collect the source fiat, one regulated to disburse the destination fiat. The stablecoin step in the middle exists purely as a settlement primitive between the two regulated legs; it isn’t a service you opt into.

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Fiat-to-stablecoin (onramp)

The recipient receives a stablecoin balance on-chain instead of fiat. The first half of the diagram above; the offramp leg is skipped.

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Stablecoin-to-fiat (offramp)

The reverse: you fund the payout with stablecoin from a wallet you control, and the recipient receives fiat. The second half of the diagram; the collection leg is skipped.

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Custody model

Teel’s custody surface is minimal by design: The smart-wallet escrow is an audited on-chain contract with two-key control (an operator key for routine releases, a cold owner key for emergency intervention). Its sole job is to hold stablecoin between the collection and disbursement legs and to release it deterministically when the disbursement partner confirms readiness. Teel cannot move escrowed funds to a destination not pre-authorized by the corresponding quote and partner instruction. For onramp-only and offramp-only flows, the escrow step is bypassed entirely.

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Licensing & compliance

Teel operates as a technology service provider to a network of licensed financial institutions. Each leg of every transaction is conducted under the licenses held by the partner executing that leg:

• Collection legs are executed by partners licensed as Money Service Businesses, Electronic Money Institutions, or equivalent in the jurisdiction where the source funds originate.
• Disbursement legs are executed by partners licensed as banks, EMIs, or remittance providers in the jurisdiction where the destination funds land.
• On-chain settlement uses regulated stablecoin issuers (and, where applicable, native cross-chain transfer protocols) for the intermediate leg.

You — our partner — onboard once with Teel through a unified KYB flow. Teel then propagates the relevant subset of your KYB record to each downstream partner whose license is needed to serve the corridors you’ve requested. This is the same model partners like Ramp Network, Wise Business, and Stripe Treasury use to abstract a network of licensed institutions behind one API.

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Compliance flow

Each partner runs their own independent compliance review under their license. Teel surfaces the per-partner approval state via GET /kyb/onboarding-status, and routes transactions only to partners that have approved your KYB for the relevant corridor. Per-transaction screening (sanctions, PEP, transaction monitoring) is performed by the executing partner under their license, with Teel forwarding the relevant payload at execution time.

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What Teel is, and isn’t

If your risk or compliance team asks “who is regulated and where,” the answer is each partner in our network is regulated in the jurisdictions they serve, and the executing partner for any given leg is identified in the payout record’s provider field. We can provide the licensing details and audit attestations of the partners covering your corridors on request — contact support@teel.finance.

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Next steps