What Are the Best Fintech Security App Solutions?

Fintech App Security Solutions to Use

If you are planning on building a Fintech app, then you will want to include the latest cybersecurity measures to protect your customers and prevent their sensitive personal and financial data from getting into the wrong hands.

There are many ways to keep fintech apps secure, and how you go about implementing cybersecurity into your app depends on a number of factors. Who is your target audience? What kind of personal and financial data will you be collecting and storing? Do you require different levels of permission access so that users can only access the features and information that they need to use the app properly? These are just some of the many questions to consider when building a secure fintech app.

Whether you are developing a fintech app in-house or outsourcing to a Software Development Company, your dedicated software team should take the time to understand your requirements and prepare a project scope that accurately predicts the amount of time, money, and labor required to complete that project. Below is a quick breakdown of the most common fintech security solutions out there.

Data Security Encryption

Data encryption is the process of encoding information into a code that requires special keys to decipher into a readable format. Encryption algorithms come in different levels of complexity, with the most common being:

• RSA: A highly secure asymmetrical algorithm that is available in both public and private encryption keys.
• 3DES: A commonly used form of encryption for credit card PINs. 3DES divides data into 64-bit blocks and then ciphers each bit-block three times. However, as of 2022 onward, 3DES is gradually being phased out in favor of more secure algorithms such as AES-256.
• Twofish: A symmetric encryption algorithm that is free to use and divides data into 128-bit blocks, making it one of the more secure encryption protocols out there, albeit at the cost of being a bit slower than Rijndael.

Depending on the type and nature of your fintech app, your software development team will decide which form of customer data encryption is best for your app and explain why that specific type is the most suitable choice.

Firewalls

A firewall is a tool that monitors incoming information and prevents malicious data or actors from entering the system. Think of it as a wall that sits between a safe and everything else on the outside. It looks at information coming in and determines whether the information is safe or not to pass through.

When properly developed for a fintech app, a firewall can help automatically prevent internal and external threats from wreaking havoc on the app and gaining sensitive personal or financial data from a customer. This includes preventing a malicious actor from modifying a customer’s account details or preventing them from seeing such information in the first place.

Role-Based Access Control

Different types of users have different needs when it comes to interacting with an app. For an e-commerce app, a store owner will need access to many ‘back end’ functions of the store, such as updating product listings and descriptions and adjusting pricing structures, while a customer will want to be able to add/remove items from their basket, use a third-party service like PayPal to pay for their purchase, and submit a question to customer service for support.

This same logic applies to fintech apps, where not every user will want (or should even have) the same level of access permissions across the board. For this reason, it is vital that your fintech app has some form of role-based access control.

For instance, your app may have assigned roles such as administrator, customer, IT specialist, technician, and customer support staff. Each role will require varying degrees of access to perform their intended tasks and to minimize the risk of the wrong person having access to the wrong sensitive personal or financial data.

This way, the vast majority of employees and customers won’t have direct access to sensitive data, and those that do must meet very strict requirements to have that sort of access in the first place.

Precise Authentication Technologies

Forcing your users to have strong, secure passwords is not enough to prevent internal and external intrusions. You must go a few steps further so as to increase the number of steps a user must take to access the app without making the process too cumbersome or time-consuming. Fortunately, with data protection, this is something that a professional security testing team can help with.

One-Time Password (OTP)

One way to enhance the authentication process is to have a One-Time Password system (OTP). This means that each time a user tries to access the app, it will generate a unique, limited-time, and one-time use password that the user must input in order to access the app.

OTPs can also be requested prior to completing a transaction to ensure that the current user is who they say they are.

Reduced Log-in Session Times

Another effective approach is to have short log-in sessions. This is where you restrict the amount of time that a user can spend inside the app before they are booted out and must log back in again. This gives hackers limited time to access the information that they may want or need and potentially not enough time to do other tasks like transfer funds.

Adaptive Authentication

An adaptive authentication is an advanced form of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which takes the traditional approach one step further by analyzing a user’s behavior to detect suspicious activity – even after logging in.

This means that, instead of confirming the user’s identity just once at the login screen, the system will carry out real-time assessments throughout the session as well. The system may ask the user to perform a biometric scan, type in a code sent via SMS, or use a one-time password to continue to use the app.

These measures are designed to catch hackers that may have been able to successfully login but who then do not have the means to satisfy other forms of verification that the system comes up with during a session.

DevSecOps

When developing a fintech app, it is vital that cybersecurity is at the forefront of the developer’s mind early in the project.

The way to achieve this is to have a DevSecOps pipeline as part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It involves making decisions about cybersecurity, early and often, during each stage of development, from planning to design and coding to testing.

This way, cybersecurity gaps and vulnerabilities can be detected and resolved early, and the foundations of a strong cybersecurity system can be put in place before the entirety of the app comes together. Having a DevSecOps pipeline will also help the development team keep up with fintech security compliance standards, including region-specific standards like GDPR for Europe.

This is far better than implementing cybersecurity later in development, where the essential UI elements, features, and other functions have already been built and incorporated into the app. Making last-minute changes may require undoing a lot of hard-earned work, increasing the risk of the project going missing the deadline and exceeding the budget.