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In a role reversal, Xaltsa fintech startup from Singapore founded 18 months ago, acquired Contour network, a digital commerce platform set up by eight major banks, including HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the acquisition price was in the millions and consisted of cash and shares.
Backed by Accel and Citi Ventures, Xalts enables financial institutions to build and manage blockchain-based applications. Contour was launched in 2017 by a consortium of eight banks to digitize commerce and is currently used by 22 banks and more than 100 global companies, including Tata Group, Rio Tinto and SAIC.
Xalts was founded in 2022 by Ashutosh Goel and Supreet Kaur, who previously held senior management positions at HSBC and Meta, respectively. Kaur tells TechCrunch that they launched Xalts because large financial institutions and businesses often don’t have a single process for managing all of their financial products, like business loans, issuing a letter of credit or a bank guarantee. Instead, they are managed by different teams, both inside and outside their organization. For example, if a commercial bank provides a loan to a company, different teams work on KYC, onboarding, risk, compliance and issuance.
If a financial institution decides to create applications to make the process more efficient, they usually ask their IT teams or external software service providers to do so, but this can cost a lot of money and take months. The goal of Xalts is to enable companies to create their own applications and share them not only within their organization, but also externally.
Supreet Kaur and Ashutosh Goel, founders of Xalts
The startup plans to turn Contour into a rail connecting banks, businesses, and other institutions, and integrate it with Xalts’ platform. Kaur says this will allow Xalts customers to not only build applications, but also connect with each other in a secure and compliant manner. This will begin by enabling banks and logistics companies to offer their customers integrated commerce and supply chain applications on a single platform.
World trade should reaches $30 trillion by 2030, but traders still face a lot of friction. Transactions often take a long time because everyone involved, including importers, exporters, banks, logistics companies and customs, exchange information in a mostly manual process.
Kaur says Xalts’ main growth area is enabling banks to be more connected with corporate customers and offering B2B financing solutions, including trade finance and lending. One example she gives is of a global fast fashion conglomerate with sellers in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Even though the conglomerate bank does not have a presence in these countries, it can help suppliers access financing through a one-click solution across its internal supplier portfolio by using Xalts to create integrated applications.
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