Delivery Risk

You bought a bevy of bobbleheads on eBay. But...will you actually get them? Receive them properly and unbroken? Get them delivered?

Yeah, delivery risk is a Thing. Especially when coming from an international seller. PayPal mitigates some of the financial risk, in that there is a relatively straightforward financial tracer. There also exist risks via handling damage from FedEx, getting the wrong item, or even worse—getting nothing at all. Think: Christmas 2018, when you were...naughty.

In the financial world, delivery risk is also sometimes related to counterparty risk. Essentially, it refers to the risk of the other side of a transaction defaulting on either cash for whatever you've sold...or delivery of whatever you've bought.

This can refer to anything from securities trading (where collateral in the form of cash or other securities may need to be verified as collateral) to cargo shipments (where sellers may have to issue a performance bond in the form of a Standby Letter of Credit) to whether or not Domino’s will deliver your pizza after your credit card has already been charged (if they don’t arrive, you’re out of luck unless there’s a Papa John’s or Little Caesar’s in the vicinity.)

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is Delivery Vs. Payment?63 Views

00:00

Finance a la shmoop what is delivery versus payment? alright this is delivery [Man delivering package to man and woman]

00:09

and this is payment and this is what happens when the whole thing fails to go

00:16

off without a hitch yeah and yeah some poor dock worker

00:20

who's gonna have to clean all that up well when it comes to selling stock

00:24

there's typically less bloodshed but it's no less important to make sure that [Stock delivery appears at door]

00:28

delivery of the goods in this case maybe it's a hundred shares of get-rich-quick

00:32

com happen simultaneously with payment for those goods or at least so that the

00:38

payment is trackable with the delivery well delivery versus payment or DVP for

00:43

anyone who's in a hurry is from the perspective of the buyer if you're

00:47

looking at things from the seller's point of view it's RVP receive versus

00:52

payment because you're receiving the dough or the payment got it [Seller and Buyer appear]

00:56

but yeah DVP is basically a settlement system it's a way of ensuring that any

01:01

transaction involving the sale of a security goes smoothly so that no one

01:06

needs to have rocks tied to their ankles no cash no stash and no splash so why do [Person moving with rock attached to ankle]

01:11

we have delivery versus payment like why is this even a thing well you could

01:16

imagine in the past that people were paying for things that didn't exist like

01:20

they thought they were buying 100 shares of whatever.com they paid the broker and

01:24

while the shares disappear the broker disappeared everyone disappeared and oh

01:28

well money's gone so what happens today is there was typically a lag in what's

01:33

basically a mini escrow account where the money sits for a few days t plus 3 [Money appears in a vault and clock ticks]

01:37

it used to be t plus 5 being sure that the seller actually had legal title to

01:42

the shares that they were selling to you and that your money was in fact good and

01:46

not Somalian warlord laundered money or at least easily identifiable Somalian

01:50

warlord laundered money that's why there's a lag and that's why delivery

01:53

versus payment has kind of two separate steps got it get it good! stay out of the water... [Man kicks other man into water]

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)