Busy Bees Automates NetSuite-to-DBS Bank File Exchange With Files.com—Without Running SFTP Servers

Busy Bees Singapore is an early-childhood education provider operating nurseries, preschools and childcare centres as part of the Busy Bees Asia group. It runs ten early-childhood brands across Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, with more than 140 centres reaching over 7,000 students a year and employing 1,500 people.

Behind ten brands sits one finance operation. NetSuite is the group’s ERP, with six subsidiaries running in it, and DBS is the group’s bank. Suppliers get paid and accounts get reconciled through files: accounts-payable instructions going out to the bank, statements and acknowledgements coming back. Before Files.com, every file that moved between NetSuite and DBS moved because someone transferred it over SFTP manually. With six subsidiaries each needing its own bank-facing connection, the manual process could not scale across the group.

The Bank Sets the Terms

DBS exchanges payment files machine to machine through IDEAL Connect, its host-to-host channel. Its terms are not negotiable on the customer side. Every file is PGP-encrypted. Every connection runs over SFTP. And every connection originates from static IP addresses the bank has whitelisted.

Automating the exchange meant meeting the bank’s channel requirements, and Busy Bees had no cloud SFTP service that could. Without a managed layer providing fixed IP addresses and PGP key management, the alternative was to build and operate dedicated SFTP servers, with static IPs to maintain, keys to rotate and ciphers to patch, all to talk to a single counterparty.

Whatever sat between NetSuite and DBS had to present static IPs the bank could whitelist, encrypt every outbound file and decrypt every inbound one automatically, speak SFTP in both directions, and move files between systems with no person in the loop. Busy Bees selected Files.com to be that layer and placed the site in Files.com’s Singapore region.

An Encrypted Pipeline Between NetSuite and DBS

Files.com became the bank-facing infrastructure Busy Bees never had to build: the endpoint DBS whitelists, the place encryption happens, and the machinery that carries every file between the ERP and the bank.

The site presents static Files.com IP addresses, which DBS whitelisted for the host-to-host channel. Connections run over SFTP in both directions, so the bank sees exactly the kind of counterparty its channel expects.

Encryption is a folder setting, not a script. NetSuite drops accounts-payable files into an outbound folder, and Files.com PGP-encrypts each one automatically before delivering it to the bank over SFTP. Inbound, Files.com Remote Server syncs pull MT940 account statements and acknowledgements back from the bank’s server throughout the day, and the files decrypt automatically as they land. Nobody on the team touches a key or runs an encryption step by hand.

From there, Files.com Automations carry each file the rest of the way. Decrypted statements move into the folder NetSuite polls, processed files move to an archive, and reconciliation inputs are copied on to ReconArt, the group’s reconciliation platform. Failed steps retry on their own and raise an alert when they cannot recover, so a stalled transfer surfaces instead of failing quietly.

The whole group runs on this one pattern. Six outbound SFTP connections operate in production, one per NetSuite subsidiary, all from a single Files.com site.

Payments and Statements That Move Themselves

The workflow went live in April 2023. With it in production, Busy Bees replaced manual SFTP handling with a repeatable, encrypted exchange between its ERP and its bank. Accounts-payable files now leave NetSuite encrypted and reach DBS without anyone transferring or encrypting them by hand. Statements and acknowledgements arrive decrypted and in place for NetSuite and ReconArt, so reconciliation starts from data that is already there.

All six subsidiaries exchange files with the bank through one site and one integration pattern rather than six separate bank-facing setups. Busy Bees operates no SFTP infrastructure of its own: there are no servers to patch, no fixed IPs to maintain and no keys handled by hand.

That distinction matters each time the channel changes. When Files.com added a new IP range, Busy Bees coordinated with DBS to whitelist it without standing up or reconfiguring its own transfer servers. When DBS announced that it would disable weak SFTP ciphers, the requirement fell on the SFTP stack Files.com maintains, not on servers Busy Bees would have had to upgrade itself. The bank keeps tightening its terms, and each tightening lands on the platform.

Host-to-Host Banking Without the Infrastructure

Today the group’s finance operation talks to its bank machine to machine. A payment run starts in NetSuite and ends at DBS without a person carrying files in between, where it used to depend on someone transferring each file over SFTP by hand.

Busy Bees showed that a company does not need to own transfer servers to satisfy a bank’s host-to-host requirements: the static IPs, the PGP encryption and the cipher compliance are all met by Files.com, sitting between the ERP and the bank as managed infrastructure. When DBS changes its terms again, that is where the change will land.