FinTech scale-up — pre-launch penetration test.
A UK FinTech scale-up was preparing to launch a new customer-facing platform and needed senior, manual-led penetration testing aligned to industry-standard frameworks. The objective was clear: high-impact findings identified, remediated and retested before go-live.
- Sector
- Financial technology
- Headcount
- Growth-stage scale-up
- Regulatory context
- FCA-regulated activities; SOC 2 in-progress; enterprise customer assurance
- Services engaged
- Web application and API penetration testing; remediation guidance; retest
- Engagement type
- Fixed-scope engagement with retest
- Duration
- Scoping, testing, remediation window and retest delivered before launch
Published with the client's written permission. Identifying details have been generalised.
Launch confidence, not just a report.
The product team was approaching a hard launch date for a new customer-facing platform combining a web application, public APIs and a third-party identity provider. Previous testing had produced a long PDF of low-severity findings that the engineering team had struggled to action under delivery pressure.
Leadership wanted a partner who would scope the assessment pragmatically, focus testing effort on the components that actually carried risk, and produce remediation guidance the engineering team could act on without a translator.
Scope it tight, test it deep.
A scoping workshop with the product, engineering and security leads identified the highest-risk components: authentication and session handling, the public API surface, payment flows and privilege boundaries between customer roles. Testing was aligned to industry-standard frameworks including CREST, OWASP, NIST and PTES.
A senior tester led the engagement end to end. The team had a Slack channel directly into the test, so newly discovered issues could be discussed and triaged in real time rather than waiting for the final report.
Manual-led testing with engineering in the loop.
- Authenticated and unauthenticated testing across the web application and public API surface.
- Targeted review of authentication, session handling, authorisation boundaries and rate limiting.
- Business-logic abuse scenarios specific to the FinTech product flows, not generic web checklists.
- Real-time triage channel with engineering during the test window.
- Plain-English remediation guidance with reproduction steps, suggested fixes and verification criteria.
Launched with the high-impact issues closed.
- High-impact findings concentrated in authentication, authorisation and business-logic flows — exactly where they matter for a FinTech product.
- All high-impact and significant findings remediated within the planned window.
- A formal retest confirmed closure of in-scope findings before launch, with the evidence pack shared with the first enterprise customer's security team.
- The engineering team gained reusable patterns (authorisation checks, rate limiting, logging) that have been applied to subsequent releases.
A report engineers actually read.
- Executive summary: risk narrative, posture assessment and launch recommendation in language suitable for the board.
- Technical findings: each finding with reproduction steps, impact, suggested remediation and verification criteria.
- Retest report: confirmation of closure for each in-scope finding, suitable to share with enterprise customers under NDA.
- Reporting deliberately concise — no padding, no generic checklist appendices.
From point-in-time to continuous.
Following launch, the scale-up moved to a continuous testing cadence aligned to release milestones, combined with a VMaaS service covering infrastructure and supporting cloud workloads, and a documented incident response retainer aligned to the company's SOC 2 programme.
"Placeholder pull-quote from the CTO or Head of Engineering — to be approved by the client before publication."
Security services materially reduce risk and improve detection and response, but no provider can guarantee prevention of incidents. Responsibility for compliance certification remains with the customer.
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