Earnest Replaces IBM Sterling with Files.com

Overview

Earnest offers private student loans and refinancing to borrowers across all 50 U.S. states. Headquartered in San Francisco with a remote team of 350+ employees, Earnest has originated billions of dollars in education loans.

A fully digital experience drives Earnest’s business: fast approvals, flexible repayment terms, and an industry-leading “Client Happiness” model that has produced strong customer satisfaction scores. To sustain double-digit growth and meet evolving regulatory demands, Earnest took on a major technology overhaul.

Challenges

Earnest’s business model involves data transfers that require a modern Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution:

• High-stakes cadence. Each student-loan application triggered complex file transfers that had to complete within a strict 15-minute window. Any delay could derail loan disbursements, hurt borrower satisfaction, and expose Earnest to severe regulatory penalties, making speed and reliability non-negotiable.
• Data-security mandates. As a fintech lender subject to strict regulatory oversight, Earnest had to encrypt all files both in transit and at rest (PGP/GPG). Earnest also needed strong key management and full audit logs to meet data security standards.

Earnest previously ran an outdated, expensive on-premise installation of IBM Sterling File Gateway for its MFT needs. The solution had served the company for years, but it created several operational and technical limitations:

• Legacy bottlenecks. IBM Sterling’s infrastructure required continuous maintenance of servers, VPN tunnels, and aging hardware, diverting valuable engineering resources from more strategic, value-added initiatives.
• Multi-environment parity. To keep up with their cloud-first migration to AWS, Earnest needed consistent file transfer flows and automations across development, testing, and production environments. The old IBM Sterling setup could not offer this flexibility, leaving Earnest reliant on brittle manual configurations.

Solution

Earnest chose Files.com to replace IBM Sterling as the Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution in Earnest’s next-generation AWS cloud architecture. The platform let Earnest’s engineering, product, and operations teams:

• Map remote S3 buckets. Files.com integrated directly by mapping remote S3 buckets as native “remote servers,” letting microservices within Kubernetes manage files with minimal custom code.
• Automate complex file transfers. No-code automations simplified complex file-handling tasks, including decryption, compliance archiving, and re-encryption, reducing over 10 IBM Sterling workflows to just a couple of Files.com rules.
• Implement granular security. OpenPGP key imports, folder-level encryption policies, and Okta-backed multi-factor authentication (MFA) brought the setup into full compliance with Earnest’s security protocols.
• Improve monitoring. Real-time transfer health monitoring and event alert streaming to New Relic gave engineers full visibility into SLA adherence and operational health.
• Terraform-driven infrastructure. By templating key components (users, remote servers, automations) into Terraform, Earnest accelerated environment provisioning and produced consistent deployment across multiple environments.

Results

• Faster loan certifications. The file-delivery window shrank dramatically from 15 minutes to as little as 5, producing quicker certification by schools and faster loan disbursement to borrowers, which matters most during peak enrollment periods.
• Major engineering time savings. By delegating file transfer, encryption, and partner management to Files.com, Earnest freed up hundreds of engineering hours and redirected resources from maintenance tasks to high-value product innovation.
• Accelerated partner onboarding. The time to onboard new school servicers dropped from weeks to minutes, letting Earnest scale partnerships rapidly and efficiently.
• Cloud-first scalability. With Terraform-driven infrastructure, Earnest can replicate entire file-transfer environments in under 30 minutes, speeding up testing cycles, reducing deployment risks, and producing smoother software releases.

Conclusion

By replacing its legacy on-prem IBM Sterling installation with Files.com’s cloud-native MFT platform, Earnest didn’t just solve a bottleneck. Its file-transfer infrastructure became a strategic asset. The switch let the company deliver faster loan certifications, improve compliance, reduce engineering burden, and stay ahead of competitors by freeing up resources for product development.

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