Xalts: Disrupting Big Banks with Contour Network Acquisition

Xalts acquired Contour Network, a digital trade platform, challenging major banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered.

The Singaporean fintech firm Xalts, which just emerged 18 months ago, has turned the tables on eight big banks, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, and BNP, by acquiring Contour Network, a digital trade platform. Although specifics of the agreement were not made public, the purchase price, which included both cash and shares, was in the high single digits of the million dollar range.

Xalts allows banks and other financial institutions to create and oversee blockchain-based applications; the company has backing from Accel and Citi Ventures. More than 100 multinational businesses, including Tata Group, Rio Tinto, and SAIC, as well as 22 institutions, utilize Contour, which was launched in 2017 by an alliance of eight banks with the goal of digitizing trade.

Ashutosh Goel and Supreet Kaur, who had been at HSBC and Meta, respectively, were the founders of Xalts in 2022. Kaur explains that the reason they created Xalts was to address the fact that many big banks and companies don’t have a centralized system to manage all of their financial goods. On the contrary, many teams, both within and outside of their own organizations, deal with them. A commercial bank’s loan-to-corporation process involves many teams working on various aspects, such as customer onboarding, risk assessment, compliance, and issuance.

The typical course of action for financial institutions looking to streamline their processes is to enlist the help of their IT departments or outside software service providers. However, this can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Xalts’ ultimate objective is to facilitate the development and internal and external sharing of apps by businesses.

By integrating Contour with Xalts’ platform, the business aims to transform it into a rail that connects various institutions, like banks and corporations. Xalts’ clients will be able to construct apps and connect with each other in a secure and compliant fashion, according to Kaur. Its primary goal is to facilitate the integration of supply chain and trade applications into a single platform for use by logistics and banking institutions.

Traders still face a great deal of resistance despite the fact that global trade is projected to reach $30 trillion by 2030. Due to the manual nature of the information exchange between importers, exporters, banks, logistics providers, and customs, transactions can take quite a while.

Xalts’ primary focus, according to Kaur, is helping banks forge stronger relationships with their corporate clients and providing them with business-to-business (B2B) financing options, such as trade finance and lending. A worldwide fast fashion company with suppliers in Bangladesh and Vietnam is one example she cites. A one-click solution on the conglomerate’s internal vendor portfolio built with Xalts allows vendors to receive finance, even if the conglomerate’s bank isn’t present in those nations.