Innovative FinTech Company Mitigates Risk with Guardsquare

The Company

Ninety-nine percent of European businesses are classified as small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and only 17% of them say that digital technology has been fully integrated into their processes. When competing in a global economy, the ability to conveniently and securely process digital payments is a massive competitive advantage.

One of our clients, a FinTech startup based in northern Europe, is working to close this gap by providing simple, accessible, and affordable payment processing solutions. Launched in 2020, their award-winning Software Point-Of-Sale (SoftPOS), tap-topay solution enables small and independent businesses across the retail, transport, and hospitality industries to turn any NFCenabled Android device into a payment terminal, accepting contactless payments from their customers and achieving greater visibility into their operations and cash flow.

"Guardsquare helped us to securely release our products to the market on time."

— Chief Product Officer at FinTech (SoftPOS) SME

The Challenge

As a small business themselves, the company had two main challenges they needed to overcome in regard to their mobile app’s security: limited resources and strict regulatory compliance.

Like most startups, they faced tough decisions between hiring talent or partnering with out-of-thebox solutions providers. Although both have their pros and cons, being in a high-risk industry like FinTech, they had to tread carefully. While building high-priority items inhouse provides greater visibility and control, working with an external vendor for specialized tools, like application security, ensures the industry’s best practices are put in place from the start, while keeping payroll low and reducing the time spent on hiring and training new staff.

They needed a partner that could help them comply with cybersecurity mandates and regulations without slowing down their release schedule. Examples of these regulations include Payment Card Industry’s DSS, CPoC, and MPoC, EU Commission’s PSD2, and requirements laid out by their payment processing partners (i.e. Visa or Mastercard), among others.

”During the evaluation process we found that some vendors we evaluated quoted prices that were up to 10x more expensive than Guardsquare’s.”

— Chief Product Officer at FinTech (SoftPOS) SME

The Solution

The company chose Guardsquare as their mobile app security partner based on our extensive track-record in mobile app protection and our affordability in relation to other solutions.

Working closely with Guardsquare, they implemented DexGuard into the early stages of their Android app’s development cycle, adding multi-layered code hardening techniques and runtime application self-protection (RASP) checks into the app’s code. Once added, DexGuard’s automated and polymorphic capabilities apply different security configurations with each build. This ensures the app’s security is comprehensive and repeatedly changing, while also meeting compliance requirements. Moreover, DexGuard removes redundant code and unused resources, shrinking its size while maintaining the highest level of user experience.

"Thanks to Guardsquare, we don’t have to actively think about our app’s security anymore, we don’t have to hire people to look into or spend time on it. We just need to pay a fee annually, and know that it is well taken care of."

— Chief Product Officer at FinTech (SoftPOS) SME

The Result

In collaboration with Guardsquare, the company was able to configure DexGuard for optimal mobile app security, pass all required security evaluations, achieve compliance, and launch their app on the Google Playstore on schedule.

According to the FinTech company, a significant benefit of partnering with Guardsquare has been peace of mind. After the initial implementation phase, they’ve been able to rely on Guardsquare’s automated protection mechanisms to defend their apps from malicious activity, allowing them to focus on innovation and growth. Their development team remains agile, able to integrate customer feedback quickly and continuously improve UX.

The company estimates that DexGuard saves them the work of 2-3 full-time developers. By partnering with Guardsquare, this FinTech company has been able to retain the agility of a growing business, while being protected by robust, enterprise-level mobile app security.

"We used Guardsquare to get out to the market as fast as possible… It has given us the ability to move faster and more safely, which is exactly what we were looking for.”

— Chief Product Officer at FinTech (SoftPOS) SME

Want to see for yourself how Guardsquare can protect your Android and iOS apps against common attacks ?

Guardsquare offers the most complete approach to mobile application security on the market. Built on the open source ProGuard® technology, Guardsquare’s software integrates seamlessly across the development cycle. From app security testing to code hardening to real-time visibility into the threat landscape, Guardsquare solutions provide enhanced mobile application security from early in the development process through publication.

More than 900 customers worldwide across all major industries rely on Guardsquare to help them identify security risks and protect their mobile applications against reverse engineering and tampering.

The creators of ProGuard® www.guardsquare.com