The Contrast platform allows Backbase to release software faster without the need of a big application security team.

Backbase empowers more than 150 financial institutions around the world to accelerate their digital transformation. From onboarding and origination, to everyday banking and servicing, the company helps financial institutions surpass their customers’ expectations at every touchpoint. However, the financial sector continues to be one of the most targeted industries when it comes to cyberattacks. According to Contrast’s 2021 State of Application Security in Financial Services Report, 98% of respondents admit that they have experienced at least three successful application exploits in the past year that have caused an operational disruption and/or a data breach.

“The big picture is that companies in the financial industry are as much of a software company as they are a finance company. Financials are also the largest consumer of open source software and application security is critical to the future of these businesses,” said Jeff Williams, CTO and co-founder of Contrast Security. “As applications get more complex, more interconnected, and more critical - the risk goes up exponentially. So, financials, and companies like Backbase, are taking application security seriously.”

For organizations that experience more than 10 application security related breaches a year, the average breach costs more than $1 million. Given Backbase is in the process of moving customers to its Backbase as a Service cloud offering in AWS and Azure, security is a top priority. The company turned to the Contrast platform that includes Contrast Protect and Assess to deliver measurable business results. Contrast Protect protects the customers’ data in cloud environments without the hassle of managing and tuning different cloud web application firewalls (WAF). Backbase is also now able to release software faster by leveraging Assess. Its customers will also use Assess to build custom integrations.

“Before Contrast, we were using different static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and WAF solutions. We found ourselves overwhelmed with tool soup,” said Brian Vlootman, CISO at Backbase. “Contrast consolidated everything into a single platform with accurate and fast results that we were not aware of before. The ability to offer interactive application security testing (IAST) and runtime application self-protection (RASP) in a single agent was a major selling point for us. The platform features were more mature than their competition and made it easier to manage, integrate and consume results. We were also impressed with the seamless onboarding process. As an example, Contrast is protecting us against the recently disclosed Log4j vulnerability without having to patch or update our servers.”