TowneBank Replaces Manual WinSCP Transfers With a Files.com Hub for Azure Blob

TowneBank is a roughly $17 billion bank operating across coastal Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, built on commercial, treasury, and retail banking with insurance, mortgage, real estate, and title affiliates alongside. It has grown largely by acquiring other banks.

A bank that size runs on files. Every business day, wire files, ACH batches, image cash letters, loan-servicing batches, and the transaction files that update online-banking balances move between the bank and the vendors that process them. Most of those files carry a deadline set by someone else: a vendor's overnight job, an accounting close, the wire system's daily closeout.

TowneBank also made an infrastructure choice unusual for a bank its size. It is cloud-first, with Azure Blob storage as the backbone of its application estate, and it ran no traditional managed file transfer platform in front of that estate. Those two facts together are the story: a business made of deadline-driven file exchange, with no dedicated machinery to run it.

The Bank's Most Time-Sensitive Files, Pulled by Hand

Until 2022, the most critical of those files moved by hand. An engineer opened WinSCP, a desktop SFTP client, and worked through the day's transfers vendor by vendor: exception files from the Baker Hill loan system, staged before a 7:30 AM vendor job; files delivered to Blackline, the bank's accounting platform, by 9:00 AM; month-start batches from the loan servicer; and, at the end of every day, a wire-fraud file from the core banking platform that the wire system needed by 5:58 PM for closeout.

The cost was not the clicking. It was that the delivery mechanism for the bank's most time-sensitive files was a person at a keyboard. The wire-fraud file was one the bank could not afford to miss, and its window closed at 5:58 PM whether or not anyone was free to pull it. Every deadline on the list depended on someone being at the desk, on time, every day.

Each flow had been manageable when it arrived; the routine grew one vendor at a time. But TowneBank adds counterparties as a strategy. Its commercial and treasury client base keeps expanding, and every acquired bank arrives with its own set of live vendor flows that must keep running through the transition. A bank whose growth model is more counterparties cannot run its file exchange through one person's daily routine. TowneBank had outgrown hand-driven transfer.

Cloud-First, With No Place to Put an MFT Appliance

The conventional answer for a regulated bank is an on-premise MFT platform. For TowneBank that was a poor fit. Its storage and applications live in Azure Blob, so an appliance would have added a box to patch and a hop in every path, and forced internal applications to start delivering files somewhere new.

What the transfer layer actually had to do was specific. It had to speak SFTP to hundreds of external counterparties, each with its own quirks: connection caps, encryption requirements, firewall rules demanding fixed IP addresses. It had to read and write Azure Blob directly, so internal applications could keep dropping files exactly where they already did. It had to run every exchange on a schedule, with no one in the path. And it had to present itself to partners under the bank's own name.

TowneBank selected Files.com to be that layer, and stood it up in 2022. Vendor SFTP connections moved one by one while manual WinSCP retrieval continued alongside during the cutover.

Azure Blob on One Side, Hundreds of Vendor Endpoints on the Other

Files.com became the hub between the bank's Azure storage and its vendors. The folders that files arrive in and leave from are Files.com folders, each remote-mounted to an Azure Blob container. An internal application that writes a file to Blob has, by that act alone, handed it to the transfer platform. Scheduled Files.com syncs do the rest: pushing outbound files to each vendor's SFTP endpoint, and pulling inbound files back into Blob for downstream processing.

The estate now runs 215 remote servers and 124 syncs, roughly 90 of them on a five-minute cadence. Vendor endpoints do not behave uniformly, and Files.com absorbs those differences in configuration rather than in someone's morning.

To partners, the whole exchange runs under a transfer domain carrying TowneBank's own name, with dedicated IP addresses that vendors whitelist in their firewalls. Standing up a new third party now follows the same repeatable pattern of connectivity testing, encryption, two remote mounts, and a scheduled sync in Files.com.

A Hub for Bank File Movement

With the hub in production, TowneBank replaced a hand-driven daily routine with a scheduled exchange pattern and kept extending it across the bank.

“Anything that comes into the bank, anything that goes out of the bank in about 90% of the cases, we use files.com for that.”

• The 9:00 AM accounting delivery and the 5:58 PM wire-fraud file now move on syncs that run whether or not anyone is watching.
• Outbound partner connections grew from 143 to 182 in a single year, and each addition followed the standard pattern rather than becoming a new project.
• The same pattern absorbs whole acquisitions. File flows for acquired institutions can be stood up and tested on Files.com ahead of the transition and kept delivering afterward.

File Movement the Bank Can Grow On

Today, nobody at TowneBank sits down at the end of the day to fetch the wire-fraud file before the 5:58 PM closeout. A Files.com sync collects and delivers it on schedule, the way it does every business day. That is the immediate difference: the deadlines that once depended on a person at a keyboard are now met by machinery.

The larger difference is what the bank can take on. TowneBank adds commercial clients, adds treasury counterparties, and acquires entire institutions, and each new relationship's file exchange comes online the same way the last one did. File movement stopped being a routine one person carried and became infrastructure the bank grows on.

And TowneBank got there without ever buying the appliance. Files.com mounted the Azure Blob storage the bank already ran and put governed, scheduled SFTP exchange in front of it. The transfer layer fit the cloud the bank had built, instead of asking the bank to build around the transfer layer.