Prelude Capital Replaced Fortra’s JAMS and Custom Scripts With Files.com for Roughly 100 Counterparty Relationships

Prelude Capital is a multi-manager hedge fund adviser with offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong, managing allocations in excess of $5 billion. The firm does not simply pick managers. It engineers the terms of the allocation itself, directing its portfolio in collaboration with more than 100 established hedge funds and individual portfolio managers, with a risk operation running on a near-24-hour basis across time zones.

A business built that way runs on other institutions' data. The prime brokers, fund administrators, market-data vendors, and client banks in Prelude's network all hold files the firm needs every day: position data, risk analytics, NAV reports, performance files. Prelude controls none of the systems those files sit on. Its operation depends on pulling a handful of files a day from each of roughly 100 counterparty endpoints, on time, every day.

A Hundred Counterparty Feeds, Held Together by Hand-Built Scripts

The machinery doing that work had grown up one feed at a time. Custom PowerShell and Python scripts synced files from each partner's SFTP or storage endpoint. A JAMS scheduler, running active/active across two nodes, orchestrated the scripts. An SFTP server that Prelude maintained itself handled inbound delivery. Every counterparty connection was bespoke code, and the whole estate had to be kept alive by hand.

The cost fell on one person. The estate was not run by an IT department; it was run by the firm's Chief Operating Officer, a partner in the firm, alongside everything else a COO does. Every new prime broker or vendor feed meant writing and testing more code. And the firm was in the infrastructure business whether it wanted to be or not, patching and operating its own SFTP server, work that has nothing to do with allocating capital.

The stakes were sharpest on market data. Investment decisions depend on Bloomberg AIM, Axioma, and NAV data being in hand within a minute of availability. Bloomberg AIM reports land roughly every half hour, and each one feeds the PowerBI dashboards the firm tracks P&L on. A feed that runs late is not an IT ticket. It is stale data sitting underneath a live investment decision.

Prelude had outgrown connectivity built by hand. Its COO needed to operate the growing counterparty network alone, honor the different constraints imposed by every institution, and keep critical feeds on a one-minute cadence. As volumes climbed, the firm needed a repeatable way to add and run feeds that did not mean more scripts, more scheduler jobs, and another server to keep patched.

The Counterparties Dictate the Terms

The estate had lasted as long as it did because no generic replacement fit it. In this business, the counterparties set the rules of every connection, and each one sets different rules.

Large banks will not restructure their directories for one client. At some of Prelude's partner sites, the firm had to sync an entire remote directory tree while excluding subfolders it was forbidden to read. Encryption varied by channel: some counterparties delivered files GPG-encrypted over SFTP while others emailed them in the clear, and both kinds landed in the same workflow. The destination was fixed too. Processed data had to end up decrypted on Prelude's own Windows servers in Azure, where the firm's processing runs, not sitting in a cloud silo.

And any migration had to happen underneath live feeds. The data could not stop arriving while the plumbing changed, so each connection had to move individually, on its own schedule, with the legacy scripts still running until each replacement was proven.

What the new layer had to do was therefore specific: connect to any counterparty's endpoint on that counterparty's terms, down to the subfolders Prelude was allowed to touch; decrypt inbound files as they arrived; deliver the results onto Prelude's own servers; hold a one-minute cadence on the market-data feeds; and leave the firm nothing to host or maintain. Prelude selected Files.com to be that ingestion and delivery layer.

One Ingestion and Delivery Layer on Files.com

Files.com became the single layer between the counterparty systems and the Windows servers where Prelude processes data. Everything the scripts and the scheduler used to do ran as configuration on one platform.

Files.com Remote Server Syncs pulled from each partner's SFTP endpoint using that partner's own authentication and schedule. By late August 2024, roughly five months after onboarding began, 53 syncs had been configured—an interim milestone in the broader migration. Where a bank exposed a directory tree containing folders Prelude was forbidden to read, root-level syncs with exclude patterns skipped those paths, so the bank changed nothing and Prelude stayed inside its permissions.

Automations routed encrypted and clear files into one consolidated pickup point, while GPG decryption and Files.com Agents placed the results on Prelude’s Azure-hosted Windows servers for processing.

The business-critical feeds ran on the shortest leash the platform offered: the Bloomberg AIM, Axioma, and NAV syncs executed every minute, because the firm required that data within a minute of it becoming available. Prelude also presented a fixed identity to its counterparties, running a custom domain with two dedicated IP addresses, so partners that restricted inbound connections had stable addresses to whitelist.

Market Data Within a Minute, Without Code to Maintain

With the Files.com pipeline in production, Prelude replaced a hand-built connectivity estate with configuration. The PowerShell and Python partner-sync scripts and the two-node JAMS scheduler are gone.

• Business-critical market data is in hand within a minute of availability. The Bloomberg AIM, Axioma, and NAV feeds sync every minute, and each half-hourly AIM report flows straight into the PowerBI dashboards the firm tracks P&L on.
• The entire estate of roughly 100 counterparty relationships is operated by one person. The COO administers the whole platform, with no code to maintain and no scheduler jobs to watch.
• Adding a counterparty is configuration, not development. A new feed is a sync pointed at the partner's endpoint, carrying whatever exclusions, credentials, and keys that partner requires. There is no script to write.
• Growing volume is absorbed without new machinery. A single vendor feed already delivers roughly 7,200 files a day through the same pipeline, and it is expected to keep growing.

The platform also answered a question the old stack never could. When one of the world's largest banks put Prelude through its third-party risk process, it required attestation of exactly who owns and provides the IP addresses connecting to its systems. Prelude answered with Files.com's owned IP range and its two dedicated addresses, and passed the bank's connectivity vetting. On the homegrown SFTP setup, that attestation would have been Prelude's alone to produce and defend.

Connectivity Without Code

Today, counterparty connectivity at Prelude is not an engineering practice. When the firm needs a new prime broker or vendor feed, the COO points a Files.com sync at the counterparty's endpoint and the data starts flowing through the same decrypt-and-deliver pipeline as everything else. Files that used to arrive because somebody wrote, scheduled, and watched a script now arrive because the platform is doing the watching.

The migration itself is the part any firm running a similar estate can borrow. Prelude never asked its counterparties for anything: the banks kept their directory structures, the encryption requirements stayed exactly as they were, and the legacy scripts kept running while each of a hundred feeds moved individually, until there was nothing left for the scripts to do. A connectivity estate built by hand over years did not have to be replaced in one move. It was replaced one feed at a time, on Files.com, without a single counterparty noticing.