Major Financial Services Institution Minimized Error Recovery Time and Increased Administrative Productivity through File Transfer Automation

A major North American financial services institution receives transfers from hundreds of external sources, ranging from customers to affiliated financial institutions to third-party institutions. The vast majority of these transactions were accomplished using XML-formatted data, with a large volume of both small and large XML files.

Managing various entry points with fluctuating degrees of visibility, auditability, and control, caused frustrations for the IT staff and increased liability for the organization. Additionally, for the vast volumes of transactions, unacceptable amounts of time and resources had to be directed toward troubleshooting the breakdowns in processes due to malformed, incomplete, or nonconforming XML data and structures.

These problems not only threatened service level agreement (SLA) terms and delayed monetary transaction fulfillment, but inflated expenses tied to excessive man hours, resulting in both real and opportunity costs.

Solution

By using Globalscape EFT with Event Rules to automatically pre-process XML data transfers from trading partners before allowing further downstream consumption by over 200 internal application servers.

Globalscape EFT’s active-active deployment provided High Availability using multiple EFT servers and a load balancer, for non-stop availability of the network. Using EFT’s active-active deployment and protection by Globalscape DMZ Gateway®, transactions were consolidated through a single point of entry with a high degree of reliability for centralized visibility, auditability, policy enforcement, and rapid process creation.

Additionally, administrators leveraged the XML capabilities in Globalscape EFT with Event Rules to validate that any and all XML data entering the system was well-formed and that the files destined for different internal systems conformed to the expected schemas.

Results

With Globalscape EFT, the organization has a single consolidated point of administration for directory structures, trading partner transactions, transfer accounts, and policy enforcement to ensure the security of connections and data. All trading partner transactions, both incoming and outgoing, flow through Globalscape EFT allowing a consolidated view of all transfer activity. This allows IT personnel and vested business users to view the status of relevant transfers on demand. And while errors are now far less common, it provides administrative personnel the ability to pinpoint and troubleshoot errors as they happen.

Invalid XML submissions are rejected immediately, providing positive feedback not only to administrators but also to third parties, when appropriate. Preprocessing prevents downstream events from failing or ingesting partial data, and it reduces to new, record lows in the time it would take to address the problem and resend proper data.

The secure file transfer automation capabilities provided by Globalscape EFT with Event Rules has enabled clear visibility and fast turnaround, limiting liability, ensuring SLAs are met, freeing up resources from chasing down problems. Ultimately, this allows everyone to focus on productive tasks that contribute to the continued success of the organization.