In a cashless world, your data is king.

When was the last time you paid for something in cash? If you are like most people, you might need a few minutes to recall the answer to that question. A July 2022 Gallup poll reported that six in ten adults claim to use cash seldom to never. While the Covid epidemic may have influenced this trend, it was already a long time coming. That’s because currency has been gradually transitioning to a digital asset. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is gearing up for the adoption of digital global currencies. And when your money is on the line, you are going to  want to make sure all your ledgers are balanced. You are going to want to be assured that nothing gets lost when moving it from one place to another.

The tyranny of the CSV file

From banks to brokerage houses, lenders to insurers, vast amounts of money are traded every day without the crinkle of paper or the clink of coins. Encrypted packages comprising millions of rows of data are shared between the powerbrokers of the world at lightning speed, populating trading desk terminals, spreadsheets, analytics platforms, and more. And when these businesses share this data with external parties, it is most commonly in the form of flat files. Flat files are very simple text files with data that has no formatting information. There is nothing to state what font should be used, how large it should be, where an indent should occur — it is a pure list of data points. In its most common form, each data point in a flat file is separated by a comma. These are called comma separated values (CSV) files and are typically distinguished by the “.csv” suffix.

Anyone who has been tasked with manually transferring data from one system to another, one app to another, or one company to another has had to go through a similar process of downloading the data from one system, verifying it, correcting mistakes and missing information, and importing it to its destination system. It is a process that takes place in countless businesses every day, and it can take weeks or even months to complete. 

Data exchange can create a costly bottleneck in your workflow and even lead to the breakdown of collaborative projects. If data isn’t handled with care, it can lead to breaches in security that result in devastating legal action. Even when it goes according to plan, data exchange can be the source of fatigue, burnout, and absent mindedness — three things you most certainly do not want when your money is at stake.

Flatfile makes it simple

We created Flatfile as a solution to this very common problem. We built it in the fury of our own personal need and immediately knew it had to be shared with others who live and breathe by enterprise data exchange. At the outset, we knew that to succeed, Flatfile would need to be robust, secure, accurate, and easy to use. Well . . .  We succeeded. 

Flatfile is built on secure cloud infrastructure for industry-leading scalability and performance. It is SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant and it protects your data — in transit and in storage — using one of the strongest block ciphers available: AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard). The platform is deeply configurable to work with the systems you already have. You can access it from a browser or embed it into your own systems for seamless integration. It allows your developers to get under the hood and modify it to fit your needs. Even more important, Flatfile is breathtakingly simple to use: 

• Access the data importer from a button and upload your files

• Flatfile guides you through the process of cleaning your data and importing it correctly into your target system

• Flatfile uses AI to remember all of your decisions to make future imports faster 

Flatfile provides a simple, elegant solution to the messy work of data exchange. You’ll save time, money, and worry while avoiding costly mistakes and security risks. 

Financial data is the coffee of Wall Street; the bread and butter of business.

If you are going to put your trust into disperse digital systems for processing and reconciling your finances, you will want to make sure your coffee doesn’t spill, your bread doesn’t crumble. You are going to want to protect your data and ensure it is always exchanged quickly and securely.

Because, if data is going to ever fully replace physical currency, you will need to know how to share it with confidence.