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Secure File Delivery

Secure File Delivery (SFD) is Synctera’s batch delivery service that makes key operational and analytical datasets available to banks and fintech partners over SFTP using PGP-encrypted files. Many banking and payments workflows require regularly updated extracts of accounts, parties, transactions, and balances. These extracts are used for periodic operational and regulatory processes, and also ad hoc analyses. These often contain non-public personal information (NPPI) or personally identifiable information (PII), so they cannot be shared over email or consumer file-sharing tools. Synctera’s SFD architecture provides a secure, reliable way to deliver these datasets:
  • Files are PGP-encrypted with the partner’s public PGP key.
  • Files are delivered to a dedicated folder on Synctera’s SFTP server for each bank or fintech.
  • Access requires both valid SFTP credentials (private SSH key) and possession of the corresponding private PGP key.
  • Synctera employees cannot decrypt the files because we do not hold customer private keys.
Most banks and fintechs receive their files nightly, i.e. a few hours after the bank’s end of day to allow sufficient time for processing of the latest day’s data, but the specific schedule and datasets can be tailored per bank/fintech. SFD focuses on three guarantees:
  • Security
    • All SFD files are PGP-encrypted before being placed on SFTP.
    • Only the holder of the private key can decrypt the contents.
    • SFTP access is restricted to authorized users for that bank or fintech.
  • Privacy
    • Personally identifiable information (PII) is tokenized and stored in secure vaults at rest.
    • Synctera de-tokenizes in memory only during file generation, then re-tokenizes or removes sensitive values from internal systems as appropriate.
  • Reliability at scale
    • The pipeline is built to handle growing volumes of accounts and transactions as programs scale.
    • For commonly-requested datasets, Synctera supports incremental (delta) delivery, which significantly reduces file sizes and processing load compared to full history dumps.

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Delivery patterns: full history vs incremental (delta)

Historically, SFD delivered full history files every night: each file contained the complete dataset (for example, all accounts or all transactions for a tenant to date). As volumes have grown, this pattern has become expensive and brittle for both Synctera and partners. To address this, SFD now supports incremental (“delta”) delivery for many core datasets. Bank and fintech partners set up after Nov 2025 receive delta files by default.

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Full history files

A full history file contains all rows in a given dataset for the configured tenant(s), regardless of when each row was created or last updated. Typical use cases:
  • Initial warehouse loads
  • Large-scale re-reconciliation or backfills
  • Off-cycle data migrations
Full history files are large and may be more expensive or slower to process, especially as programs scale.

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Incremental (delta) files

A delta file contains only rows that are new or have changed since the last successful SFD delivery for that dataset and tenant. Key properties:
  • Much smaller file sizes than full history files
  • Faster to ingest and process
  • Better aligned with modern ETL/ELT “upsert/merge” patterns
Synctera’s default pattern is:
  1. Initial full history file to establish a baseline in the partner’s environment.
  2. Nightly delta files that partners apply as upserts/merges to keep their warehouse in sync.
Not every tenant will have deltas enabled for every dataset. The exact configuration (which datasets, which tenants, and whether they receive full, delta, or both) is determined based on availability and tenant implementation, and can be adjusted over time.

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Commonly requested files and delivery patterns

The table below summarizes the standard SFD datasets and their typical delivery patterns. If you need a dataset not listed here, or want to confirm whether a specific file can be delivered as deltas for your tenant, please contact your Synctera representative.