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CUSTOMER STORIES

LoyalBe - Building secure foundations for disruptive fintech startup

SERVICES

Penetration Testing, Security Consulting

Cormac Quinn

Founder

"We selected Instil because they have proven, certified experience of working in the cloud. It was paramount to have an external third party – that’s their bread and butter. It gives us confidence when they say, ‘You’ve built a good system with some brilliant defences’."

LoyalBe helps ‘connect brands with customers’ by enabling frictionless cash-back rewards at the point of sale for loyal ‘fans’.

The company hired Instil to undertake a deep-dive investigation into their cloud and mobile application security to ensure their systems were production-ready.

Approach

LoyalBe’s technology transfers cash to loyalty-card holders’ bank accounts at the point of sale. Given the sensitivity of their data, they recognised that any form of compromise would be catastrophic for their business model, and so required a cyber security partner who could deliver testing services “at the very highest-end”.

Turning to Instil for help, LoyalBe required deep-drive penetration testing across their entire infrastructure, including their backend APIs, mobile application and customer web portal. Simon Whittaker, Head of Cyber Security at Instil, said: “After testing, it was clear that security had been at the top of LoyalBe’s agenda, in designing and building their app.”

“Sometimes people assume that if you’re a startup, it means you’re not taking security very seriously. That was the exact opposite of my mentality,” says Cormac. “It takes so long to build consumer trust, and rightly so. For LoyalBe to succeed, we needed to be absolutely sure of our security credentials.

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Impact

Our work with LoyalBe was instrumental in laying the foundations needed for growth. Having delivered comprehensive penetration testing across their infrastructure, LoyalBe were left in a position where they could confidently scale their business knowing that their platform was secure.

A follow-on information security gap analysis helped them attain Cyber Essentials certification, further strengthening their cyber culture. This helped unlock more commercial opportunities and build trust among partners, customers and investors.

The results we delivered for loyalBe were profound:

  • Strengthened security posture through extensive penetration testing across AWS, APIs and software applications.

  • Secured cloud environments with AWS best practices, ensuring scalable and secure foundations for future development.

  • Certification to Cyber Essentials certification, supporting their compliance journey and enhancing credibility with partners and customers.

  • Uncovered critical issues and provided practical remediation steps, enabling LoyalBe to resolve vulnerabilities quickly.

LoyalBe founder Cormac Quinn, was incredibly satisfied with the level of security testing and consultancy provided by Instil:

loyalBe needed robust cloud scanning, to ensure we were complying with requirements of how an AWS application should look - we wanted the highest standard of testing.

We had a great experience with Instil and would definitely recommend Simon and his team to any startup.