Overcoming Partner Onboarding Challenges with Backflipt and Axway
Anil Kapatkar
July 2025
In today’s fast-paced digital economy, Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions like Axway SecureTransport and B2Bi play a vital role in facilitating secure, compliant, and reliable data exchanges between businesses and their trading partners. Yet, despite the technical robustness of these platforms, one challenge continues to frustrate organizations across industries: the partner onboarding process.
The Industry Pain Point: Onboarding Bottlenecks in MFT
For many enterprises, onboarding a new trading partner is a labor-intensive, manual process prone to errors and delays. Business users—who typically initiate partner relationships—lack direct access or technical expertise to configure MFT environments. Instead, they raise tickets via ITSM systems like ServiceNow or send emails to MFT teams, often missing critical details needed to provision partner accounts or file routes correctly.
The result is a flurry of back-and-forth communication across email, tickets, and chat channels between business users, IT teams, and external partners. Once the necessary information is collected, MFT administrators manually configure partner accounts in test environments, verify transfers, and then replicate changes into production—again, by hand, through change requests. This fragmented, multi-step process can take days or even weeks, leading to lost productivity, compliance concerns, and missed SLAs.
Backflipt + Axway: A Strategic Shift in Partner Onboarding
This is where the Backflipt Provisioning Center, built to solve the MFT partner onboarding challenges, changes the game. Designed with both business users and IT administrators in mind, it introduces intelligent automation, self-service, and governance controls into what has traditionally been a highly manual process. Recognizing that many enterprises rely on ServiceNow as their system of record, the Provisioning Center seamlessly integrates by automatically creating, updating, and closing records within ServiceNow, ensuring alignment with enterprise workflows.
Key Features & Benefits
Streamlined Self-Service Workflows
Backflipt’s Provisioning Center empowers business users to initiate onboarding and route creation through intuitive, customizable forms. Users provide essential information such as partner details, route direction, file types, compliance metadata (e.g., PII, GDPR, HIPAA), protocols, and destinations—all without writing a single line of code or creating a ticket.
Built-In Governance with Role-Based Access
Provisioning Center ensures secure operations by integrating configurable, role-based workflows. Each participant in the process—be it a business user, admin, or approver—interacts only with the information relevant to their role. Business unit segmentation ensures data visibility is isolated and consistent.
Unified Visibility Across Environments
Unlike conventional onboarding tools that treat test and production environments as separate silos, Backflipt offers a unified view across both. Partner accounts and file routes can be configured and validated in the test instance, then seamlessly promoted to production.
Seamless Integration with ServiceNow
Provisioning Center integrates natively with ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, preserving the organization’s centralized system of record. Requested Items (RITMs) are generated and managed directly within ServiceNow workflows.
Accelerated Outcomes with Measurable Impact
The value proposition is clear:
- Partner onboarding times are reduced by up to 50%
- Business users are empowered to drive onboarding with minimal IT friction
- Manual tasks are replaced with error-proof, one-click automation
- Compliance risk is reduced by consolidating partner data and workflows
Conclusion: Rethinking MFT Onboarding for the Modern Enterprise
As data exchange becomes more regulated, more critical, and more complex, organizations need smarter tools that bridge the gap between business operations and IT systems. Backflipt Provisioning Center for Axway MFT does just that—bringing together automation, visibility, and control to transform partner onboarding from a bottleneck into a strategic enabler.
The future of MFT isn’t just about secure file transfers—it’s about enabling secure, seamless, and scalable business collaboration. With Backflipt and Axway, that future is already here.
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