Värde Partners Replaced Cerberus FTP Server and Hand-Built Counterparty Connections With Files.com

Värde Partners is a global alternative investment firm specializing in credit and credit-related assets. Founded in 1993 and fully partner-owned, the firm has invested more than $100 billion across the credit quality and liquidity spectrum, with investment hubs in the US, London, and Singapore and strategies spanning asset-based finance, real estate, and corporate credit. It is regulated as an investment adviser in the US, by the FCA in the UK, and by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The firm describes its whole platform as data-driven: an in-house data science team shapes how it underwrites and gives it a real-time view of the assets it holds.

That data comes from outside. A credit and mortgage investing business runs on files from other people's systems: banks, loan servicers, originators, and data providers across the US and Europe. Every deal the business side signs creates a recurring data exchange with a new counterparty. Some send daily raw data. Some send monthly reports. Individual deliveries can reach 100 GB. The counterparty dictates the protocol, the encryption, and the cadence, and many of them have no technical team at all. For Värde, file exchange is how the raw material of the investment process arrives.

Every New Deal Meant Another Hand-Built Connection

Before Files.com, Värde ran that exchange itself. Inbound files landed on a self-hosted Cerberus FTP Server running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Outbound, the firm connected point to point to each counterparty's SFTP endpoint, with no management layer over the connections. Files moved through desktop SFTP clients, manual SSH sessions, and custom scripts written by individual teams. When nothing else fit, departments emailed attachments, until the attachment got too large and the problem came back to IT.

The cost showed up in two places. The first was effort. Every deal the business signed meant another bespoke connection for someone to build and then maintain indefinitely, and the firm's own developers were spending engineering time building an in-house file transfer capability because the connections had to exist and nothing else was there to carry them. The second was access. There was no way to grant one person time-boxed access to one vendor endpoint, so staff and contractors shared vendor SFTP credentials with each other, from their own devices. For a regulated investment firm, a credential everyone knows is a credential no one controls. There was also no staging environment, so counterparty workflows had to be tested against production, and a developer trying a change shared a system with a live data feed.

The estate lasted as long as it did because each connection, once built, worked, and no single deal justified replacing the whole thing. What ended it was compounding. The counterparty count climbed with the deal flow, deliveries of up to 100 GB had to move reliably over SFTP the counterparties mandated, and the load outgrew what could be managed by hand. Värde decided to stop letting its developers rebuild file transfer and buy it instead.

What the replacement had to do was already written in the shape of the old estate. Connect to every counterparty on the counterparty's terms: pull from their SFTP servers and S3 buckets, accept pushes from those who could send, and decrypt GPG-encrypted deliveries on arrival. Give the counterparties with no technical team a web experience instead of a protocol. Give every internal user individual access tied to the corporate directory, so nobody ever needed to hold a vendor credential. Keep testing away from production. And log all of it completely enough to stand as the firm's compliance record.

Värde selected Files.com to be that layer.

One Connection Layer Between Counterparties and the Data Lake

Files.com now sits between Värde's external counterparties and its internal systems, as the staging and routing layer for everything that crosses the boundary.

On the inbound side, Files.com Remote Server Syncs pull from counterparty SFTP servers and S3 buckets on schedule, and counterparties that can push deliver files directly into the platform. Where a counterparty mandates GPG encryption, Files.com decrypts on arrival, inside the flow, with no manual step. Automations then fan each file out to where it is consumed: to S3 for the firm's data lake, and to SharePoint, where the business reads its reports. About 90% of everything arriving through Files.com ends up with the data science team, reaching them through those two destinations without anyone touching a file in between.

Counterparties with no technical team get a different front door into the same layer. Each is onboarded with an individual account, a self-set password, an upload-only folder, and an email notification when new files are waiting, all through a consistent web interface on Värde's own domain.

A separate staging site, with its own domain, runs alongside production. Counterparty testing and developer testing happen there, so a new workflow never touches a live feed until it works.

The migration itself ran one connection at a time. As the business made deals, the team rebuilt each counterparty connection on Files.com and converted the old CLI transfer scripts into Syncs, onboarding several counterparties a month at the peak without interrupting the daily and monthly feeds the analytics side depends on.

Individual Access, Against a Credential No One Else Knows

Access changed shape entirely. Internal users sign in through the firm's Microsoft Entra SSO, with accounts and groups provisioned automatically from Active Directory over SCIM. A user who logs in sees exactly the folders they are entitled to see. And when someone needs to reach a vendor's SFTP site directly, Files.com brokers it: the platform holds the one stored credential to the vendor endpoint and grants named users ad hoc access through it.

“Through Files.com, we can give people access to that SFTP site with a single credential that no one else needs to know.”

On top of the platform, Värde's infrastructure team built a production control plane. It wrapped the Files.com CLI in a PowerShell layer it has since released publicly and provisioned the site with the Files.com Terraform provider. Automated monitoring retries failed operations and alerts the team only when a failure persists. Activity logs export to the firm's SIEM, Sumo Logic. Värde operates the platform the way it operates the rest of its infrastructure: monitored, alerted on, and defined in code.

The FTP Server Is Gone, and So Are the Shared Credentials

With Files.com in production, Värde replaced a self-hosted server, a hand-built connection per counterparty, and a shared-credential access model with one governed layer between the outside and the inside.

• Files.com is the single connection layer to Värde's counterparties. Twenty-five outbound connections were consolidated onto it, new ones are added as deals are signed, and roughly 2 TB a month moves through it.
• Shared vendor credentials are gone. No staff member or contractor holds or passes a counterparty SFTP credential; access is individual, tied to the corporate directory, and granted through the platform.
• Onboarding a counterparty is configuration, not engineering. During the buildout the team brought on several a month, and the connection estate now grows with the deal flow rather than with engineering effort.
• The developers moved off file transfer. The in-house capability they had been building and maintaining was retired along with the server.
• The internal support burden for FTP access disappeared. Users sign in through SSO and see what they are entitled to see, so access questions stopped landing on IT.

The layer has run at production scale since: individual automations have accumulated more than 50,000 runs. And the record those runs leave behind is itself an outcome. Files.com's logging is complete enough that Värde's compliance baseline is met from the platform's own records, and when a counterparty disputes whether a file was sent or received, the firm settles it by handing over the log.

The Glue Between the Outside and the Inside

Today, when Värde's business side signs a deal, the data feed that comes with it lands in a pattern that already exists. Someone configures a sync and a set of permissions, and the counterparty's files start flowing to the data lake and the business.

“Files.com is ultimately the glue between the outside and the inside.”