• Singapore fintech startup Xalts has acquired Contour Network, a digital trading platform set up by eight major banks including HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP Paribas.
  • The goal of Xalts is to allow businesses to build their own applications.

Contour was launched in 2017 by a consortium of eight banks to digitize trade and is now used by 22 banks and more than 100 global companies including Tata Group, Rio Tinto and SAIC.

An ambitious acquisition plan

Xalts, a Singaporean fintech startup founded 18 months ago, has done a role reversal by acquiring Contour Network, a digital trading platform built by eight major banks including HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP Paribas.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price was in the millions of dollars, made up of cash and stock.
Backed by Accel and Citi Ventures, Xalts enables financial institutions to build and manage blockchain-based applications.Xalts was founded in 2022 by Ashutosh Goel and Supreet Kaur, who previously held senior management positions at HSBC and Meta respectively. Kaur told TechCrunch that they launched Xalts because large financial institutions and corporations 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 teams inside and outside the organization. For example, if a commercial bank makes a loan to a company, different teams are responsible for KYC, onboarding, risk, compliance, and issuance.

Also read: Fintech Startup Bags $1.1M

Build an application

Decided to build the application if the financial institutions to improve the efficiency of the process, they will usually ask the IT team or an external software service providers, but IT may take a lot of money and spent months.The goal of Xalts is for enterprises to build their own applications to share not only within the company but also outside.

The startup plans to turn Contour into a railway 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 way. It will first focus on enabling banks and logistics companies to offer embedded trade and supply chain applications to customers on a single platform.
By 2030, the global trade volume is expected to reach $30 trillion, but traders still need to deal with 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 largely manual process.