How to Secure Mobile Banking Super Apps

Banking super apps are becoming the key to digital finance, bringing together services like savings, loans, insurance, investments, and more in one easy-to-use app. These all-in-one mobile banking apps have transformed how consumers interact with financial services, offering unparalleled convenience. Asia leads the super app market with apps like Alipay, serving 1.3 billion users; super apps are growing in popularity in other regions as well. For example, in Africa and the Middle East, these apps are gaining popularity as efficient solutions for low-end smartphones. In the U.S., consumer interest for the all-in-one banking apps is particularly high, especially among millennials. However, along with the convenience associated with super apps comes an expanded attack surface, making mobile app security a critical aspect to prioritize during development.

Beyond banking: The scope of banking super apps

Banking super apps go beyond traditional financial services; they are increasingly integrating lifestyle services, quickly making them indispensable to their users. These banking apps are evolving into platforms that combine traditional banking capabilities like account management, investments, loans, and insurance with non-financial services like shopping, travel / concert bookings.

The value proposition for banking super apps lies in their ability to simplify user experiences. By consolidating multiple services under one platform, users benefit from convenience, time savings, and a more cohesive approach to managing their financial and lifestyle activities.

However, the broad scope of services offered by these super apps also increases their complexity and the potential risk of attack.

Banking super app security challenges

Because banking super apps aggregate a wide range of financial and lifestyle services, this creates multiple potential entry points for attackers. Each integrated service, whether managing sensitive user data, facilitating financial transactions, or connecting with third-party services such as payment gateways and identity verification providers, may introduce new vulnerabilities. These interconnected features expand the attack surface, making it critical to address the challenges faced by the mobile banking apps. Here are some of the key challenges:

• Data sensitivity: Super apps handle vast amounts of personal and financial data. A data breach can have severe consequences, from identity theft to large-scale revenue losses.
• Complex integrations: These apps integrate with numerous third-party APIs and services, each with its own security posture. This complexity increases the risk of vulnerabilities. For instance, an issue in a third-party service integrated into the super app could lead to a supply chain attack allowing attackers to easily exploit at scale.
• Regulatory compliance: Super apps in the financial sector must comply with a complex set of regulations across different regions, including GDPR, PSD2, and others, which require stringent security measures. Moreover, when integrating payment services, trade associations like EMV and PCI mandate mobile app protection to handle credit card payments securely.

Banking super app developers must account for these challenges to protect both the app publisher and end users. Like all mobile apps, once released, mobile banking super apps are beyond the direct control of the developer and are vulnerable to threats like man-at-the-end attacks. Attackers can reverse engineer and tamper with these apps for illicit activities, and malware increasingly targets financial services apps.

Key security approaches for banking super apps

To properly manage the above-mentioned challenges, developers and security teams of banking super apps should take a comprehensive approach that ensures app and data integrity, user trust, and compliance with regulatory standards. Here are some essential approaches:

Security embedded throughout the development lifecycle

Security cannot be an afterthought; it should be built into the development process from the start. Leveraging tools that integrate easily into the development workflow helps developers identify and mitigate risks early, ensuring robust mobile app protection from inception. This approach saves time and money while minimizing risks.

Code obfuscation

Code obfuscation makes reverse engineering significantly more challenging for attackers. It scrambles the app code, making it difficult for anyone to understand the app’s logic and identify areas of weakness. This approach is critical for protecting intellectual property (IP), preventing attackers from injecting malicious code or modifying the original app.

Runtime application self-protection (RASP)

RASP enables real-time monitoring and protection of mobile apps. By embedding RASP within the app, super apps can detect unusual behavior during runtime, such as attempts to run the app on a compromised device, endeavors to recertify the app, up to efforts to change the app itself. RASP ensures that, even in hostile environments, the app behaves as intended or crashes to deter any potential further attacks.

Encryption for data at rest and in transit

Encrypting sensitive information, both at rest and in transit, ensures that even if data is intercepted or stolen, it remains unreadable to unauthorized users. Data 'at rest' refers to information stored on the app or mobile device, while 'in transit' covers data traveling across networks between devices and backend servers. This comprehensive approach based on strong encryption standards helps safeguard customer data and financial transactions from unauthorized access.

Threat monitoring

Proactive threat monitoring tools analyze user behavior and respond to anomalies. Early threat detection allows teams to pinpoint the exact location of each threat, reducing the risk of major security incidents. Security teams can analyze threat data to uncover how threat actors are attempting to compromise their app. These insights can be used to further strengthen the protection of their super apps.

Protecting third-party integrations

Banking super apps rely on multiple third-party integrations, such as SDKs, to provide seamless services to users. Ensuring that third-party components leveraged within the apps follow strict security measures and adhere to best practices reduces the risk of introducing vulnerabilities through these integrations. This means banking super app publishers should, on one hand, continuously verify and monitor the security of the integrated services they use, and on the other hand, promptly communicate any identified risks to their third-party SDK providers to enable quick mitigation.

Security testing

Security testing is essential to protect mobile banking applications throughout their lifecycle. Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST) combines three methods to identify vulnerabilities. Static analysis checks the app to detect flaws early in development, pinpointing specific issues in the code; Dynamic analysis tests the running application to uncover runtime vulnerabilities by checking the app as a black-box, Interactive analysis blends static and dynamic ones, using runtime instrumentation to provide real-time insights into both code and runtime behavior. Together, these approaches ensure comprehensive security coverage, enabling developers to address vulnerabilities effectively at every stage.

Taking a comprehensive MAST approach also involves ensuring compliance with security standards like OWASP and conducting penetration testing to simulate real-world attack scenarios that automated tools might not fully capture. By integrating both automated and manual testing and leveraging runtime monitoring, banking super apps can achieve robust protection against evolving threats.

Security as a continuous process

As banking super apps continue to grow in popularity, their extensive range of features and integrations significantly increase their attack surface, making them highly attractive targets for threat actors. Maintaining strong mobile banking app security requires constant attention and adaptation. It cannot be done once and forgotten, it is an ongoing commitment. With the growing and evolving threats these apps face, developers must implement multiple layers of defense, consistently update protection at each release, continuously monitor potential threats when their apps are in market, and integrate mobile app security testing throughout the entire development lifecycle.

By adopting comprehensive security practices like code obfuscation, RASP, threat monitoring, and thorough security testing, banking super app developers can provide their users with a safe, trusted and convenient experience, ensuring that the app remains a valuable and secure resource for integrating financial and lifestyle services.

Interested in learning more about how to protect your banking super app? Connect with our experts.