Full Service Community Bank Streamlines Flow of Confidential Files with Biscom’s SFT Solution

Biscom’s SFT Solution

Security is a major concern for one of New England’s largest full-service community banks whose core values rest on valuable services and innovative technology to support its customers. The bank provides consumer and business products and services through its retail branches, commercial lending centers, mortgage banking centers, and investment management offices. The company has more than 1000 employees and $7.5 billion in assets. 

Challenges

In this environment of heightened security, the bank found that one of its biggest challenges was complying with many of the newer banking regulations, as well as state and federal mandates.  Specifically, those rules and regulations that focus on data security and privacy. 

According to the AVP if IT Security, “The size of files that we needed to send to customers, partners, vendors, law firms, and appraisal companies was much larger than our email attachment limit.”   

The bank’s method for sending large files was to burn the data onto DVDs and send them via overnight delivery. The company had security concerns about losing sensitive data in transit. Also, many of the documents were time sensitive and overnight delivery by courier service was simply not fast enough. Additionally, it was taking approximately ten hours a week for staff to manage this large file transfer process. 

Solution

Biscom’s SFT is a secure file transfer web application that enables enterprise-class large file transfer. Data transfer is secure, authenticated, and delivered directly from point-to-point. Integrated tracking and reporting capabilities provide a comprehensive audit trail.  

“We looked at other file transfer solutions but none were as easy to use and as secure as Biscom SFT,” says the bank’s AVP of IT Security. The bank currently has employees within their executive, lending, compliance, human resources, and customer information departments sending hundreds of secure deliveries per week with Biscom SFT. 

Results

The bank has seen measurable benefits across multiple departments and service areas. Biscom SFT is the primary vehicle for secure exchange of mortgage and loan documents with applicants, attorneys, and appraisers. The bank’s marketing department exchanges large audio/visual and image files with ad designers and media outlets. SFT is used to transfer data to federal and state examiners and internal auditors in preparation for bank exams. In addition, SFT transaction logs demonstrate compliance with state and federal data privacy regulations.   

Biscom has also been instrumental in facilitating the onboarding of customers from acquired banks. The process of obtaining customer information from an acquired bank is a challenge. “Typically, we have conversion files from a bank we acquire, basically all of their customer information, and we need to import that data into our system. There are multiple files that are multi-gigabytes in size, and they need to be sent securely and quickly. All the customer data needs to be sent to us from the acquired bank after end of business day on Friday, so that their customers could become our customers on Saturday morning and be able to transact business by Monday morning. We use SFT to send the files and are able to transfer all of these large, very sensitive customer files securely and quickly,” says the bank’s AVP of IT Security. “SFT is an integral part of making bank acquisitions successful.”