Perk Connected HiBob, Google Drive, and Its Benefits Provider With a Weekly Files.com Pipeline

Perk, formerly TravelPerk, is a corporate travel and spend management platform for business travelers.

The company has grown fast, to about 2,000 people, much of that through acquisition. A workforce that size, changing that quickly, produces a constant stream of HR events. In early 2025, Perk prepared to launch a new mental health benefit for its employees, administered by an outside provider, and enrolment depended on that provider holding current employee data.

That data lived in HiBob, Perk's HR platform. The provider received enrolment files on its own SFTP server. Between them sat a processing and review stage run by Perk's operations team in Google Drive. No two of those systems shared an integration, and none of the three could run the chain end to end.

A Weekly Data Obligation Running on Someone's To-Do List

The benefit was scheduled to launch in March 2025, and launch was only the start of the obligation. Entitlements at the provider had to track Perk's actual workforce, week after week. A new hire needed to appear in the provider's system before they could use the benefit, and every change after that had to follow.

The process behind that obligation was manual. Someone exported employee data from HiBob by hand and delivered it to the provider's server by hand. Enrolment was only as current as the last time a person did the work: a new employee's access waited on an export, and an ad-hoc correction waited behind whatever else that person was doing that week. For a one-time data load, that was survivable. As a permanent weekly cadence at a company hiring at Perk's rate, it was a process with a built-in failure mode. The week nobody ran the export, the data at the provider was wrong.

There was no direct integration to reach for, because no system in the chain could drive it. HiBob's interface was an SFTP export. The provider's interface was its own SFTP server. And Perk deliberately kept a human step between them: the operations team processed and reviewed each file in Google Drive, and only an approved file went onward. Whatever connected the three had to speak SFTP on both ends, treat Google Drive as a live working stage in the middle, run on a weekly schedule without anyone touching it, and leave the approval in human hands.

Perk built that layer on Files.com. The design keeps the judgment and removes the carrying: a person still decides whether a file is right before it leaves, and nobody moves it anywhere.

SFTP In, a Google Drive Review in the Middle, SFTP Out

Files.com became the one platform in the chain that spoke all three interfaces. Every system kept the interface it already had, and Files.com did the connecting.

HiBob exported employee data over SFTP into Files.com. A sync then carried the file into Google Drive through a Files.com Remote Server Mount, where the operations team processed and reviewed it exactly as before and moved the approved version into an approved folder.

From there, a second Remote Server Mount connected the provider's SFTP server, and a sync automation picked up and delivered the approved file. The weekly chain ran under a single service account, with permissions scoped to only the folders the pipeline touched. Perk kept its existing systems and human approval while eliminating manual transport between them.

Because every stage was configuration rather than code, the pattern traveled. By April 2025—one month after the first feed went live—Perk's People Systems team had stood up a second, near-identical integration, routing reports over SFTP into a different Google Drive path. It was a clone of the first: the same service account, the same mount-and-sync structure, a new source and destination.

Live in March 2025, Current Every Week Since

With the pipeline in production, Perk replaced a hand-run export-and-deliver routine with a weekly feed that runs itself.

• The benefit launched on schedule in March 2025, and employee data has moved to the provider weekly ever since, so entitlements track the actual workforce instead of the last manual export.
• When Perk submits ad-hoc HR changes, the same transformation and sync path carries them to the provider within a day rather than leaving them until the next weekly feed.
• The manual work is gone from every step except the one Perk wants a person in: the operations review that approves each file before it goes out.

The Systems Never Had to Talk to Each Other

The security team that owns the Files.com tenant reports that the pipeline runs without day-to-day attention.

The larger point is in what Perk never had to do. HiBob was not integrated with the provider. Google Drive did not learn a protocol. The provider changed nothing about how it receives files. Files.com sat in the middle, spoke SFTP to both ends, treated Google Drive as a live folder, and did the integrating itself. A pipeline across three systems did not require the systems to integrate with each other. It required a layer in the middle that speaks to all of them, and that is why the second feed was configuration instead of a project.