Liberty Bank & Trust Moves Wire Instructions and Loan Documents Off Email With a Files.com Front Door That Holds Nothing

Liberty Bank & Trust is the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. Chartered in New Orleans in 1972, it has grown from $2 million in initial assets to more than $1 billion, with branches in 11 states across the Gulf South and Midwest. The growth was hard-won: Hurricane Katrina destroyed the bank's headquarters, its records, and six of its eight New Orleans-area branches.

Lending is the heart of the business. Commercial loans make up more than 60 percent of the portfolio, and Liberty keeps loan decisions tied to the community where the request originates rather than routing them to a central office. That means loan officers in cities from New Orleans to Detroit, each collecting the paperwork a loan runs on: financial statements, tax records, wire-transfer forms. The bank's system of record for those documents is its own on-premises file servers, in each employee's home directory. Between the customer holding the documents and the server where they belong, there was one channel: email. Liberty would replace it with a branded, no-login Files.com upload path that sent each submission into the right on-premises home directory within five minutes, then deleted the platform copy.

Loan Documents on an Unprotected Channel

For years, a customer with documents to submit attached them to an email addressed to their loan officer. Sensitive financial data, including wire-transfer information, traveled to a regulated, FDIC-insured bank over a channel the bank could not protect and could not fully account for.

The bank had no standing secure channel between a customer and an employee. Every exchange was either an unprotected email or an exception someone in IT assembled by hand.

The problem survived because every conventional fix pushed work onto the customer. Secure portals authenticate people, and a person sending one set of mortgage documents will not enroll in a portal, remember a login, or install anything. Customers fell back to the channel that asked nothing of them, so email kept winning. And as the condition repeated across dozens of loan officers and staff at eight bank locations, the one-offs never stopped arriving.

A Secure Path Customers Would Actually Use

Whatever replaced email had to ask as little of the customer as email did: a link and a browser, no account. It had to deliver each file to the receiving employee's own home directory on the bank's servers, because that is where documents live. It had to leave no customer data sitting in the cloud afterward. And the page itself had to satisfy a bank examiner, carrying the bank's own domain, FDIC and Equal Housing Lender disclosures, terms the customer accepts, and limits on what can be uploaded.

Liberty Bank selected Files.com to be that intake layer.

Personal Upload Links for Loan Officers and Staff

Files.com became the bank's branded front door for customer documents: a personal upload page for each participating loan officer and staff member, with automation behind it that moves each submission onto the bank's own servers and deletes it from the platform.

Each participating employee got a Files.com Inbox, a permanent upload page reached through a link they can put in an email signature. A customer clicks the link, fills in a short form, and drops their files. There is nothing to install and no account to create, and each visitor sees only their own upload, never anyone else's. The form answers create a subfolder named for the customer automatically, so submissions arrive labeled rather than as loose attachments in a mailbox.

Behind the page, Files.com Automations sweep each inbox on five-minute intervals. Files.com Agents installed on the bank's file servers connect outbound to the platform, so nothing inside the bank's network was opened up to receive files. Each sweep moves new submissions into the receiving employee's home directory, then deletes the copy on Files.com. A customer's documents pass through the platform. They do not rest there.

The intake surface was built for examiners as much as for customers. It runs on the bank's own branded domain with dedicated IP addresses. The page footer carries the FDIC and Equal Housing Lender disclosures. Uploads require clickwrap acceptance, and file-extension restrictions limit submissions to Office documents, PDFs, and images. Fischer designed the workflow, then wrote it up as step-by-step instructions and handed it to the operations team as a standing procedure.

Off Email and Onto the Bank's Own Servers in Five Minutes

With the inbox workflow in production, Liberty Bank replaced an unprotected channel and a case-by-case exception process with one standing intake path.

• Since June 2024, customers submit wire-transfer information and loan documents through hosted forms and inbox uploads instead of unencrypted email.
• A submitted file reaches the loan officer's home directory on the bank's own servers within five minutes, and the copy on Files.com is deleted. No customer data rests in the cloud after delivery.
• Receiving a document securely from a single customer no longer requires IT to assemble anything. The channel already exists for each participating employee, and a submission creates the customer's folder on its own.
• The pattern serves dozens of loan officers and staff across eight bank locations. Bringing the next employee onto it is configuration, not a project.

A Front Door Built to Hold Nothing

The difference shows from both sides of the exchange. A customer with mortgage documents to send clicks a link in their loan officer's signature and finishes in a browser, having enrolled in nothing. The loan officer finds the files in their own home directory minutes later, labeled by customer. And when an examiner asks how customer financial data enters the bank, Fischer can walk the entire path: a branded page carrying the required disclosures, an automated sweep to the bank's own servers, and a deletion behind it.

Liberty Bank did not secure its document intake by moving its records to the cloud or by asking its customers to become users of anything. Files.com sits between the customer's browser and the bank's file servers, carries the bank's brand, and holds each document only for the minutes it takes to deliver it. The front door's whole job is to hold nothing.