Route402

Inspiration

When an Ohio manufacturer pays a German supplier €380,000, the payment passes through a chain of correspondent banks, takes days to settle, and arrives smaller than it left, with no clear record of where the difference went. This is the norm, not an edge case. Research from Harvard and the BIS found that large banks quietly charge businesses 2–4% through exchange-rate markups, even on currency pairs that cost them almost nothing to trade. Most business payments still take more than a day to land. Across the market, that adds up to an estimated $570 billion lost every year, mostly by mid-sized companies without treasury teams to negotiate better terms. At the same time, on January 18, 2027, the GENIUS Act takes effect, creating the first US federal framework for payment stablecoins and letting businesses move fully reserved, regulated digital dollars that settle in minutes instead of days. That gap between today's costly, slow system and what becomes possible next year is what inspired Route402.

What it does

Route402 helps companies pay overseas suppliers faster and cheaper without losing control. A finance team member simply tells the agent what needs to be paid, like "pay Maple Freight 50,000 CAD by Friday." Route402's AI agents then compare the ways to send that money, from the company's usual bank wire to faster, regulated stablecoin options. For each one, the agents show the total cost, how much the supplier will receive, and when it will arrive. Before any money moves, Route402 checks the supplier against sanctions lists and confirms the payment follows the new stablecoin rules. A person on the team always gives the final approval. If the supplier's bank details have recently changed, someone has to verify them by phone first, which guards against the most common type of payment fraud. Once approved, Route402 sends the payment and tracks it until the supplier is paid. It then confirms whether the final cost matched the quote and prepares the record the company's accountants need. Every step is logged, giving teams the savings of new payment technology with the oversight they already rely on.

How we built it

Route402 is built as three connected pieces: a payment engine, a team of AI agents, and a web app.

The core is a TypeScript and Express backend that acts as the payment router. It prices every possible route for a payment, splits a payment across up to three routes when that's cheaper, and runs every safety check before money moves: approvals, sanctions screening, stablecoin rules and fraud controls. Every action goes into a tamper-evident audit log. A separate payout service tracks each transfer through funding, currency conversion and delivery, keeping its own ledger, so each payment can be reconciled against what was quoted.

To ground everything in real company data, we connected to Capital One's Nessie API. A company can link its accounts and pull in balances, unpaid bills and incoming deposits. Route402 then plans payments around the cash the business actually has, rather than made-up numbers.

The intelligence comes from Fetch.ai. We built six uAgents that work together on each payment:

• Routing: finds the best path for the money.
• Liquidity: checks whether there's enough money to fund the payment.
• Compliance: screens the supplier before anything can move.
• Execution: carries out only the steps a person has approved.
• Reconciliation: checks that what actually happened matches what was approved.
• Investigation: explains what went wrong when a payment stalls.

A concierge agent coordinates them and is registered on Agentverse, so teams can also plan and approve payments directly in ASI:One chat using interactive cards. We designed the agents so they can recommend but never authorize. Only a signed-in person with the right role can approve a payment, and nothing typed into a chat, invoice or supplier name can override that.

We used x402 to let the agents pay for what they use. When an agent needs a live quote or a compliance screen, it pays a small amount of test USDC on Base Sepolia through Coinbase's x402 protocol, with strict per-payment and total spending caps. Every stablecoin payment also carries a real on-chain x402 settlement proof that we verify on the blockchain. For international trade, we wrote a smart contract escrow that holds funds until delivery is confirmed, as a lighter alternative to a letter of credit.

The interface was designed in Figma. We created five core screens: the agent home, suppliers, manual payment, review and approve, and payment tracking. We then used Figma's MCP integration to turn those designs into the working app, keeping its layouts, icons and styles while connecting every screen to real data. We kept the frontend to plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so the whole app stays lightweight and fast.

Throughout the build, we checked the work with automated tests for the payment logic, security, compliance and accounting rules, plus browser tests that walk through the full flow, from asking the agent to settling the payment.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was that moving money across borders is as much a legal problem as a technical one. We had to learn how money transmission, sanctions screening, the Travel Rule and the new stablecoin rules apply to a product like ours. We then turned them into checks that run automatically, including rules that switch on by date. One example: under the GENIUS Act, only coins from approved issuers can be used starting January 18, 2027. Off-ramps were harder than we expected. Off-ramps are the services that turn stablecoins back into local currency, and of the 22 stablecoins we looked at, only a few have a real path to a supplier's bank account, with enough trading volume to handle a business-sized payment. So we narrowed our routes to a small set, like Circle's EURC for euros, StraitsX for Singapore dollars and Juno for Mexican pesos, and priced them from live order books instead of advertised rates. Every price in Route402 has to come from a real source, or be clearly labeled when it doesn't. Finally, giving AI agents a role in moving money forced us to think hard about safety. We designed the agents so they can recommend payments but never approve them, and so that text hidden in an invoice or a supplier name can't trick them into doing something they shouldn't.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we could create Route402 as an end to end prototype that actually functions in two days. A finance team member can type a payment request in plain English, and Route402's Fetch.ai agents price every route using live exchange rates, measured bank fees and real stablecoin order books. A coworker approves it, and the team can watch the payment move all the way to settlement, with a ready-to-export accounting entry at the end. We're especially proud of the real pieces running underneath. The agents pay for their own quotes using x402 on Base Sepolia, every stablecoin payment carries an on-chain settlement proof, and an escrow smart contract can hold funds until a shipment is confirmed. The whole flow also works inside ASI:One chat. We built the guardrails a real finance team would expect: separate preparer and approver roles, phone verification when bank details change, sanctions and stablecoin compliance checks, and an audit log that can't be quietly edited. Most of all, we're proud that we kept it honest. Every number in Route402 comes from a real source or is clearly labeled when it doesn't, and the agents can suggest payments but can never approve them on their own. That balance between using new payment technology and keeping people in control is what we think makes Route402 something a real company could trust.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how international business payments work, from accounting to regulation. On the accounting side, a payment in another currency involves more than one number: the exchange rate, the transfer fees and the amount the supplier receives all have to be recorded separately and matched to the right invoice. The exchange rate can also change between when an invoice is booked and when it's paid, which creates a gain or loss the company has to record. On regulation, we learned how money transmission laws, sanctions screening, the Travel Rule, MiCA in Europe and the GENIUS Act affect which payment routes and stablecoins can be used, and what information has to be sent with a payment. Working with blockchain, we learned that settling on-chain is fast, but converting stablecoins back into local currency is often the harder and more expensive part. Building with Fetch.ai taught us how to split a task across multiple agents that pass messages to each other, and how to limit what each agent is allowed to do.

What's next for Route402

Our next step is getting Route402 ready for the GENIUS Act taking effect on January 18, 2027. That means limiting stablecoin routes to coins from approved issuers once the approved list is public, and keeping our compliance rules current as regulators finalize the details. Before Route402 can move real customer money, it also needs to be properly licensed. Rather than getting money transmitter licenses in every state ourselves, we plan to start by working with licensed partners: a bank or payments company to hold and move funds, regulated providers for stablecoin conversion, and licensed payout partners in each country we support. Alongside that, we'd add real company verification (KYB), a professional sanctions screening service, proper login with multi-factor authentication, and secure key custody through a regulated provider instead of keys we manage ourselves. Once that foundation is in place, we'd like to run a small pilot with a few mid-sized companies that pay overseas suppliers, start with a handful of payment corridors, and connect to real accounting systems like NetSuite and QuickBooks so payment records flow straight into their books.

Built With

• claude
• fetch.ai
• fetchapp
• figma
• nessie
• python
• typescript
• x402