Fairway Home Mortgage Replaces Citrix ShareFile and Lands Borrower Documents in SharePoint With Files.com

Fairway Home Mortgage, formerly Fairway Independent Mortgage, is a residential mortgage lender operating nationwide through a distributed branch network with more than 9,000 employees.

Every loan starts with documents. Borrowers hand their loan team some of the most sensitive financial paperwork a consumer ever produces: loan agreements, W2s, and similar PDFs, all of it time-sensitive, because a loan waiting on a document is a closing waiting on a document. And at Fairway, that collection happens at the branch level, across distributed loan teams, at volume. A lender built this way was always going to need a serious answer for how borrower files come in from the outside and where they land once they do.

Shared-Link Privacy, and Documents That Never Reached SharePoint

External file exchange with borrowers ran on Citrix ShareFile, and it carried a link-privacy problem Fairway was not willing to live with: recipients could see the contents of a shared link. That visibility did not meet Fairway’s privacy requirements for sensitive borrower paperwork.

The second half of the problem was where the documents ended up. SharePoint was the intended system of record for the branch team’s borrower documents, but intake never reached it. Files scattered across OneDrive instead, spread over a separate Microsoft Teams account for each lending team, so the record of the branch team’s lending lived in fragments the system of record never held.

The arrangement broke first where the volume was heaviest. One branch team was moving roughly 7 GB of PDF files per team member, every week, and had reached the limits of the provider it was on. What had been an uncomfortable pattern became an untenable one.

The fix could not be to simply use SharePoint, because borrowers needed a simple external upload path rather than access to Fairway’s internal Microsoft environment. And it could not be another standalone sharing tool, which would fix the link-privacy problem while leaving the documents just as disconnected from the Microsoft estate where the branch team actually worked. For a pilot with that team, Fairway needed an intake layer that was secure toward borrowers and outside vendors on one side, and wired into its own Azure tenant and SharePoint sites on the other. Fairway selected Files.com to be that layer.

SharePoint Sites Mounted Behind a Borrower-Facing Front Door

For the pilot branch team, Files.com became the external face of SharePoint: governed intake toward borrowers and vendors, Fairway’s own Microsoft estate behind it.

Using an Azure App Registration in Fairway’s own tenant and Files.com Remote Server Mounts, the branch team’s SharePoint sites appeared as folders inside Files.com, targeted to the specific locations where borrower documents belonged.

On the intake side, borrowers could deliver documents through Files.com share links and inboxes. Each inbox session was independent by design: an uploader could see only their own submission, never anyone else’s, meeting Fairway’s uploader-isolation requirement. An outside video vendor used the same path as the branch team, while SSO and user and group permissions governed the internal side.

Between the two, Files.com synced everything through to SharePoint on a 15-minute interval, a cadence Fairway tuned specifically for time-sensitive loan documentation. Fairway’s own staff built the entire workflow, with Files.com sales engineering on call.

Fifteen Minutes From Upload to the System of Record

With the workflow in production for the pilot team, Fairway replaced the previous shared-link and per-team OneDrive pattern with a single governed path from the borrower to the branch team’s system of record.

• Borrower documents land in the branch team’s SharePoint sites within 15 minutes of upload, with no one shepherding files between systems.
• Roughly 7 GB of PDFs per team member moves through the path every week: the volume that had outgrown the previous provider now runs as routine.
• The new intake meets Fairway’s shared-link privacy requirement, while inbox sessions isolate each uploader so one borrower never sees another borrower’s files.
• An outside vendor delivers through the same route as the branch team, under the same controls and into the same system of record.

The pilot also established a repeatable pattern for Fairway’s intended wider rollout: another SharePoint site could join the path by being mounted and given a sync.

The Front Door SharePoint Never Had

For the pilot branch team, what changed was where the boundary of Fairway’s Microsoft estate sat. External exchange used to happen outside it, on ShareFile links with the shared-link visibility that concerned Fairway, into OneDrive accounts the system of record never saw. Now a borrower or vendor uploads through a governed Files.com page, and within 15 minutes the document is sitting in the SharePoint site where the branch team does its work. A loan officer waiting on a W2 finds it there, not in a link and not in someone’s OneDrive.

Fairway did not abandon SharePoint to fix external file sharing for the pilot team, and it did not bend SharePoint into a borrower-facing job it was never built for. It put Files.com in front of it.