Why Xalts Is Buying Contour Network

By Amit Chowdhry • Feb 21, 2024

Xalts – a company used by financial institutions and businesses to build and manage digital finance applications – announced its acquisition of Contour Network (owned by a consortium of global banks to accelerate digitization in trade and supply chain finance).

Contour was launched in 2017 as a pilot by eight global banks focusing on digitizing trade. Currently, over 22 banks and 100+ global businesses use Contour for digital trade finance solutions.

Xalts – used by institutions to build multi-party applications for digitization and tokenization – plans on leveraging Contour’s industry-standard workflows and integrations to facilitate communication and transactions between businesses and financial institutions in the network.

The focus for Xalts will be on embedded solutions for trade and supply chain finance. And these will enable banks, logistics companies, and technology companies to offer integrated solutions to businesses using a single platform. 

Xalts was launched in 2022 by Ashutosh Goel and Supreet Kaur, former senior executives at HSBC and Meta. Currently with a team of over 50 across offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, India, UAE and UK, Xalts counts large financial institutions, regulatory bodies and technology companies as its clients.

KEY QUOTES:

“We want to create a Plaid for Trade. Our vision is to expand the scope of Contour’s network which is trusted by banks and corporates, and build it into a rail that enables businesses to access digital solutions for trade and supply chain finance offered by banks, fintechs and technology partners. Combining our platform with Contour’s Network will allow participants to develop and deploy customized solutions quickly.”

  • Ashutosh Goel, CEO of Xalts

 “Our platform also enables institutions to build new innovative applications and products by leveraging blockchain and tokenization. We partner with leading blockchains and integrate with multiple infrastructure providers to help our clients build tokenization applications. Contour will also enable network members to work with us to launch applications in this space.”

  • Supreet Kaur, COO of Xalts

“Accel has backed innovative companies globally in this space. Xalts has demonstrated that they have the right vision and a team that can execute at a global scale very quickly.”

  • Abhinav Chaturvedi, Partner, Accel

“Citi has long been a leader in driving innovation in financial services. We invested in Contour in 2020 and led the seed round for Xalts in 2022. The combination of these two companies into one firm with an expanded vision and a great leadership team will accelerate innovation in global trade finance.” 

  • Everett Leonidas, Director, Citi Ventures