In a role reversal, Xaltsa fintech startup from Singapore founded 18 months ago, acquired Contour network, a digital commerce platform created by eight major banks, including HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price was in the high single millions and consisted of cash and stock.
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 enterprises, including Tata Group, Rio Tinto and SAIC.
Xalts was founded in 2022 by Ashutosh Goel and Supreet Kaur, who previously held senior executive 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 to handle all of their financial products, such as corporate loans, issuing letters of credit or bank guarantees. Instead, they are handled by different groups both inside and outside their organizations. For example, if a commercial bank gives a loan to a company, different teams work on KYC, onboarding, risk, compliance and issuance.
If a financial institution decides to build applications to make the process more efficient, they usually ask their IT teams or external software service providers, but this can cost a lot of money and take months. Xalts’ goal is to let businesses build their own applications and share them not only within their organization, but also externally.
Xalts founders Supreet Kaur and Ashutosh Goel
The startup plans to turn Contour into a rail line connecting banks, companies and other institutions and integrate it into its Xalts platform. Kaur says this will allow Xalts customers to not only build apps, but also connect to each other in a secure and compliant way. It will first focus on enabling banks and logistics companies to offer integrated commerce and supply chain applications on a single platform to their customers.
World trade is expected to it reached $30 trillion by 2030, but marketers still have to deal with a lot of friction. Transactions are often time-consuming as all parties involved, including importers, exporters, banks, logistics companies and customs, exchange information in a mostly manual process.
Kaur says Xalts’ biggest growth area is enabling banks to connect more with corporate customers and offer B2B financial solutions, including trade finance and lending. An example he gives is a global fast fashion group with salespeople in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Even if the conglomerate bank is not present in these countries, it can help suppliers access financing through a one-click solution in its internal supplier portfolio, using Xalts to build end-to-end applications.
