What is Straight-Through Processing?

STP originated in financial services, where a trade or payment traditionally passed through multiple hands — order entry, clearing, settlement, reconciliation — each a potential source of delay and error from manual re-entry. A fully straight-through process instead moves data electronically between systems in a single, validated flow, from the moment a transaction is created to the moment it's settled and recorded, with automated exception handling for anything that fails validation along the way. The metric that matters for STP is the "straight-through rate": the percentage of transactions that complete without any human touch versus the percentage that fall out into a manual exception queue. Improving that rate usually means tightening upstream data quality and validation rules so fewer transactions trip the exception path, rather than just automating the exception-handling itself.