Xflow Transforms Cross-Border Payments with Transparency and Speed for Indian Businesses

"If I order something on an e-commerce site today, I get six or seven notifications. It'll be a ₹100 book but I'll get notifications: the book left this warehouse, it's here, it's going to be delivered today. But I'm expecting a $100,000 wire from my customer? It's radio silence." This stark contrast, shared by Anand Balaji, Co-Founder of Xflow, perfectly captures the frustrating reality of cross-border B2B payments that his fintech startup is determined to fix.

Balaji, along with his two co-founders—all former Stripe executives—identified a massive gap in the B2B cross-border payments market: the complete lack of transparency, tracking, and predictability that businesses face when receiving international payments. Their solution, Xflow, is bringing the same visibility and speed that consumers enjoy in domestic transactions to the complex world of international B2B payments.

The conversation reveals how three payments industry veterans are solving one of the most persistent problems in global trade: the antiquated, black-box nature of moving money across borders.

The Stripe DNA: How Three Payments Veterans Built Xflow

Balaji's journey to founding Xflow reads like a masterclass in fintech experience. After starting his career at Hughes building India's version of DoubleClick in 1999, he pursued an MBA abroad and joined Amazon's India launch team in 2012. But it was his five-year stint at Stripe, starting in 2016 as the first employee on the ground in India, that would shape his vision for Xflow.

"I ended up working on figuring out how we can launch Stripe in India," Balaji recalls. "That was my first real exposure to payments—the nuts and bolts of it. I had to get involved in all the details: how a payment is complete, how settlement is done, how long it takes, how we reconcile all the little nuts and bolts."

This deep payments expertise, combined with his co-founders' backgrounds—one an ex-banker who headed credit risk for Stripe in APAC, another with extensive product and tech experience at Stripe—gave the team unique insights into both the banking infrastructure and the product experience needed to solve cross-border payment challenges.

Why Stripe Couldn't Build It

The decision to start Xflow outside of Stripe was deliberate. Balaji explains that B2B cross-border payments are fundamentally different from Stripe's core DNA of consumer-to-business (C2B) transactions.

"Stripe largely focuses on how do we make consumer payments frictionless," Balaji notes. "But B2B is a very different animal to deal with. The payment terms, invoices—it's very different. The experience you're building is different."

This fundamental difference in use case—payment terms, invoice-based workflows, larger transaction sizes, business compliance requirements—meant that the solution needed to be built from the ground up, not as an extension of existing C2B payment infrastructure.

The Problem: Cross-Border Payments as a Black Box

Before building Xflow, the team conducted extensive research, speaking with over 100 different customers. What they discovered was a universal frustration with the opacity and unpredictability of international B2B payments.

"Cross-border payments didn't have the payment guarantees that domestic payments had," Balaji explains. "Today, if I'm a merchant accepting domestic payments, I know the process. I know how long it takes for payment to happen, for settlement to happen, for refunds. I deterministically know what I'm being charged. I can see and verify all of these things."

This predictability was completely absent in cross-border B2B transactions. The lack of visibility created what Balaji calls a "black box" experience where businesses essentially send money into a void and hope it arrives eventually.

The Hidden Cost Reality

One of Xflow's most striking discoveries was the gap between perception and reality regarding foreign exchange costs. Balaji explains that nearly all MSMEs believe their banks charge them "a few pips on the dollar" for FX conversion—but the reality is dramatically different.

"What I found unique is that the number of times even small MSMEs tell us that their bank has told them they're getting a few pips on the dollar on FX conversion—it's almost universal. But it's almost universally true that that's not what they're getting," Balaji reveals.

The actual cost, when Xflow's team analyzed foreign inward remittance advisories, was often 1.5-2%—far higher than the "few pips" (0.01-0.02%) that businesses believed they were paying. This transparency gap became a key part of Xflow's value proposition.

The Solution: Transparency, Speed, and Global Banking Partnerships

Xflow's approach to solving these challenges combines deep banking partnerships with modern technology to create a completely different experience for businesses receiving international payments.

The company's strategy centers on working with large multinational banks like JP Morgan Chase that have presence across multiple countries. By routing money within these global banking networks, Xflow can dramatically speed up transactions and reduce costs.

Next-Day Settlement for Cross-Border Transactions

The results speak for themselves. Xflow offers next-business-day settlement for payments received until 10-11 PM—dramatically faster than traditional wire transfers that can take 2-3 days or longer. This speed is achieved through the company's deep integration with global banking partners and its intelligent routing algorithms.

"Any payments that customers receive until like today 10-11 PM get settled to them the next business day in their INR bank account," Balaji explains. "We'll tell them transparently what the pricing is—which was actually a pretty big challenge for an industry that has operated without any transparency in pricing."

Building in the Delta Wave: Xflow's 2021 Founding Story

Starting a fintech company in 2021, during the Delta wave of COVID-19, presented unique challenges. Balaji recalls that the entire fundraising and hiring process happened over video conferencing—a completely remote experience that was still relatively unusual at the time.

"We started in 2021 in the middle of Delta wave. So COVID made starting up something much, much more difficult," Balaji shares. "We were interviewing and we started working everything remote for a while. Now it seems very normal—at that time it was still like 'oh man, we did everything from fundraise to everything all over purely video conference.'

Despite these challenges, Xflow's team managed to attract exceptional talent from companies like Uber, Flipkart, and Amazon—often convincing them to take significant pay cuts in exchange for ESOPs and the opportunity to build something transformative.

The 20% ESOP Strategy

One of Xflow's most distinctive founding decisions was setting aside 20% of the company's equity as an ESOP pool—nearly double the typical 10-11% that most companies allocate. This was designed to ensure that early employees would genuinely benefit from the company's success.

"We designed a policy where if people came and contributed early on in the journey, then the ESOP stayed with them," Balaji explains. "And even if they were in a different company when eventually there was liquidity, they would benefit from it."

Customer Acquisition: Building Alongside Users

Xflow's go-to-market strategy was remarkably straightforward: talk to 100+ customers before building, then build alongside early adopters. This approach ensured product-market fit before significant capital deployment.

"Before we even got started, we spoke to like a number of merchants who are already receiving cross-border payments or sending cross-border payments," Balaji explains. "We had all of them to tap into, and we were talking to them constantly as we were building, as we were designing the product."

This customer-centric development process meant that Xflow's first set of customers came from the very merchants they had interviewed during the product development phase. Growth came through word-of-mouth referrals as satisfied founders recommended Xflow to others in their networks facing similar challenges.

The 7,000 Customer Milestone

Today, Xflow serves over 7,000 customers who use the platform for various cross-border payment needs. The company's transparency-focused approach has particularly resonated with MSMEs and growth-stage companies that previously lacked leverage in negotiating favorable FX rates with their banks.

The Future: Global Ambitions from India

While Xflow is currently focused on perfecting its go-to-market playbook in India, the company's ambitions are explicitly global. Balaji emphasizes that India is just the starting point, not the final destination.

"Our ambition is not just to build a company that solves India's problems," Balaji states. "We are building something that will be global. While today we are focused on ironing out our GTM playbook in India, our hope is that over time we will actually take this product global."

This global perspective is reflected in Xflow's regulatory strategy—the company has already secured licenses in other markets and is building infrastructure that can scale beyond Indian borders.

The Regulatory Opportunity

Balaji sees India's complex regulatory environment not as a barrier but as an opportunity. The challenges of navigating India's foreign exchange regulations, compliance requirements, and banking infrastructure create moats that protect companies who solve these problems effectively.

"Wherever there is this kind of complexity, actually is an opportunity because people are not happy with this situation," Balaji explains. "When you talk to our merchants who are dealing with the pain of having to manage all this opacity and this whole black box experience, they wanted a different solution but it just wasn't there."

From First Principles to Reality: The Xflow Philosophy

Throughout the conversation, Balaji returns to the concept of "first principles thinking"—an approach that involves questioning assumptions and building from fundamental truths rather than analogy or accepted wisdom.

This philosophy guided Xflow's approach to reimagining cross-border payments from the ground up rather than accepting industry conventions. It's also reflected in the company's culture, which Balaji deliberately modeled after Stripe's exceptional workplace environment.

"Stripe not just built great products—the products were a result of the culture they built, not the other way around," Balaji observes. "The founders were very deliberate about the culture they wanted to build, about getting people to behave like owners, to constantly think about what the user experience is. And so they were deliberate in building that culture, and the product you saw from Stripe was a result of that."

The Bottom Line: Transforming How India Receives Global Payments

Xflow represents a new generation of fintech companies that are combining deep domain expertise with modern technology to solve persistent problems in global finance. By bringing transparency, speed, and user experience design to the antiquated world of cross-border B2B payments, the company is making it easier for Indian businesses to participate in global trade.

The company's early success—7,000+ customers, next-day settlement, regulatory approval—demonstrates the massive demand for better cross-border payment solutions. As India's export economy continues to grow and more businesses serve global customers, Xflow's infrastructure becomes increasingly critical to the ecosystem.

Perhaps most importantly, Xflow's founding story offers a blueprint for aspiring fintech entrepreneurs: identify a real problem through extensive customer research, build alongside users from day one, apply first principles thinking to industry conventions, and don't be afraid to tackle complex regulatory environments.

Anand Balaji is a Co-Founder of Xflow, a cross-border payment infrastructure company. Previously, he was part of Stripe's India launch team and worked on Amazon's India launch. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and has over 25 years of experience in technology, marketing, sales, and business development.