What is an FBO account?
One bank account, many customers' money — held for their benefit and reconciled to the penny.
FBO stands for for-benefit-of. An FBO account is a single bank account that legally holds funds on behalf of many end customers, with a sub-ledger tracking how much of the pooled balance belongs to each one.
Why platforms use it
Opening a separate bank account per customer doesn't scale. An FBO structure lets a platform hold many customers' funds in one account while still knowing, to the cent, whose money is whose.
The reconciliation rule
The defining property of a sound FBO setup: the sub-ledger must always sum to the cash in the bank account. If the parts don't equal the whole, something is wrong. That reconciliation has to hold every day, across every customer.
On DigitalTreasury
FBO balances live on the double-entry ledger, where "the money we hold" and "the money we owe" are the same number by construction — reconciled daily, per tenant. See compliance & controls for how isolation and audit back it up.
What are virtual accounts?
Give every customer their own account number on one real account — so inbound money self-attributes.
Double-entry accounting for software platforms
Why the 500-year-old accounting model is exactly right for a modern payments ledger.
What is payment reconciliation?
Making your books and the bank agree — and why the best reconciliation is the kind you never run.