Majority of the payment systems presuppose that the money flows in one direction and serves one purpose. The customer is paid, the merchant is paid and the transaction is over. This assumption is only effective in the simple use cases. Financial lanes are run simultaneously in real businesses. One of the lanes has daily operations. Another deals with treasury, reserves and long term planning. Where such flows are forced in one direction, friction is manifested at once.
Operational payments do not work in the same way as treasury movements. The sales should be clear in a fast manner, predictive settlement windows and clean reconciliation should be daily. However, treasury funds are subjected to risk management, compliance control and planned timing. Combined with both, businesses become invisible. Money that is supposed to be in the liquid form gets accidentally locked. Long term stability funds are subjected to short term fluctuation.
Plasma has realized this difference and settles as a multi lane system instead of using a single pipeline. Plasma does not impose all the value with a common logic as it enables the flow of payments to take purpose driven routes. Operation settlements are also predictable and regular. Treasury flows are also tamed and planned. This division will lessen confusion inside and enhance financial discipline without creating extra complexity to the end users.
In addition to this, the two lane settlement enhances accountability. Finance departments are able to clearly see the available money that can be used at the moment, and the one that is used as strategic. Audit trails become more evident to compliance teams. The operations teams minimize mistakes that are brought about by inefficient allocation of capital. These gains are hardly caused by quicker transactions. They are of superior framework.
Single lane systems do not yield much of a protest. They operate until volume is growing or business models are changing. At that stage, firms have no choice, but to create workarounds that add manual processes and operation risk. The design of plasma does not do this because it prioritizes that businesses do not treat all money equally.
My opinion is that the dual lane settlement is not a sophisticated feature. It is a fundamental prerequisite to serious business. A properly built infrastructure that acknowledges this fact enables companies to grow without having to reconsider the financial structure on a regular basis. The approach of plasma indicates the knowledge of the manner in which real organizations operate money, rather than the flow of transactions.