A Credit Investment Manager Replaced On-Premise FTP With Files.com and Made Bank Connections Routine

A US credit investment manager receives and scrubs market, pricing, ratings, and trustee data to produce reports for its investment teams.

That business runs on data from other institutions. Trustee banks report on loan portfolios. Ratings agencies deliver ratings files. Market-data and analytics firms send pricing. The firm ingests all of it, scrubs it, and turns it into the reports its investment teams work from. In the financial industry, that exchange happens over SFTP, machine to machine, on schedules the counterparties set. And every new deal, data partnership, or investor brings another connection. The firm needed to absorb every new counterparty’s requirements on its own side, without asking the counterparty to change.

A Growing Counterparty List on a Server Built for a Shorter One

The firm ran this exchange on an on-premise FTP server, with file-exchange identity tied to Active Directory and the whole estate operated by an outsourced IT provider. The arrangement put the flexibility on the wrong side of every connection. The counterparties are large banks, ratings agencies, and audit firms, bound by their own change control, and getting one of them to adjust anything on its side means a forms process that can run for months. Every accommodation the firm could not make on its own side became a wait on the slowest institution in the exchange. The server itself limited what the firm could offer: it could not give counterparties the SSH-key authentication institutional connections require, and any change to the estate went through the outside vendor rather than the firm’s own team.

That setup was workable while the counterparty list was short. It stopped being workable because in corporate credit the list never stays short: new banks, vendors, and investors arrive with each deal, and each arrival means a new SFTP connection with its own schedule, format, and authentication requirements. As part of a broader push to bring its technology in-house and build its own security foundation, the firm needed an exchange layer its own team could run.

What that took was less a file server than a gateway: a hosted SFTP endpoint that authenticates counterparties with SSH keys, lets the firm configure each accommodation on its own side of the connection, routes files between counterparties without touching internal systems, delivers to the exact minute a receiving system expects, and keeps the internal file server out of reach of the outside world. The firm selected Files.com as that gateway, retired the on-premise FTP server along with its Active Directory integration, and brought the estate in-house from the provider that had run it.

Files.com as the SFTP Face to the Outside World

Files.com is now the firm’s SFTP server to the outside world and the routing layer between every party it exchanges data with. The internal Egnyte file server sits deliberately behind it, which gives the team control over its backend and keeps internal users away from files in transit.

Each counterparty endpoint was authenticated with SSH keys and connected through inbound and outbound syncs. Inbound syncs pull vendor files into Egnyte, so an analyst finds the morning’s data on the same network drive as everything else. A small number of counterparties hold local Files.com accounts instead and log in directly to drop and collect files. Because every connection terminates in a system the firm controls, an accommodation such as a folder layout, a filename convention, or a delivery window is a configuration change on the firm’s side, not a request into a bank’s change queue.

Most of the traffic never touches an internal system at all. Files.com Automations move a file received from one counterparty straight to another counterparty’s SFTP endpoint. This vendor-to-vendor routing makes up the majority of the automation estate: a trustee bank’s file arrives and lands at the ratings agency with nobody at the firm handling it. Timing matters, too. Counterparties run their own scheduled jobs and expect files to be waiting when those jobs fire, so one ratings-agency delivery is collected at an exact minute every morning, ahead of the agency’s own trigger, and the scheduled sync holds that minute every day. The firm staged the migration in a development environment first, then converted production sync by sync, keeping the cutover invisible to internal users and counterparties.

Counterparty Connections Multiplied Within Months

With Files.com in production as the gateway, the firm replaced an exchange that waited on other institutions with one it adjusts itself.

• Counterparty accommodations that once meant a request into a bank’s forms process are now configured on the firm’s own side, by its own team, with no counterparty change control involved.
• Outbound counterparty connections multiplied within months, because adding a bank or data partner is now configuration rather than a project.
• The majority of the flow runs with no human handling: files route from one counterparty to another, exact-minute deliveries go out every morning, and internal users pick up vendor data on the drive they have always used.
• The on-premise FTP server is gone, and the internal file server sits fully behind the Files.com gateway, carrying five concurrent connections where it used to carry fifty.

All the Flexibility on One Side of the Connection

The firm cannot change its counterparties. Trustee banks and ratings agencies keep their red tape, their fixed schedules, and their own authentication requirements. What changed is where the flexibility lives. Since moving to Files.com, every quirk a counterparty brings gets absorbed on the firm’s side of the connection. A change that used to open with a request to someone outside the firm, whether a bank’s forms queue or an outsourced vendor’s ticket system, now opens with an analyst configuring it and moving on. For a firm whose business generates a new counterparty with every deal, that is the difference between growing at the pace of the credit markets and growing at the pace of the slowest institution’s paperwork.