DevSecOps is becoming essential for financial institutions striving to balance rapid digital innovation with stringent security and compliance demands. This guide outlines how embedding dynamic application security testing (DAST) into CI/CD pipelines helps mitigate risks, reduce remediation costs, and maintain trust across modern and legacy systems.
In banking and finance, speed is important—but trust is paramount. As financial institutions race to deliver digital experiences through apps, APIs, and online platforms, they also face growing pressure to secure sensitive data, maintain compliance, and mitigate rising cybersecurity threats.
This makes DevSecOps not just a buzzword but a business-critical transformation. By embedding security into every stage of software development and delivery, DevSecOps empowers teams to release quickly and securely. But in financial environments, often constrained by legacy systems, siloed teams, and strict regulations, building secure pipelines isn’t easy.
With Invicti’s DAST-first platform, financial institutions can operationalize security across modern and legacy environments in a tech-agnostic way, aligning DevSecOps with risk, compliance, and developer velocity.
Digital banking, fintech innovation, and mobile-first experiences have dramatically accelerated release cycles. Teams now push updates weekly or even daily. But every new release introduces potential vulnerabilities.
For financial institutions managing transactions, user data, and regulated services, security can’t wait for a quarterly audit. DevSecOps bridges the gap, making continuous security a default part of delivery.
From data breaches to compliance violations, the cost of unpatched vulnerabilities in the financial sector is skyrocketing. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of dealing with a data breach in finance is over $6 million, and that’s 22% more than the average cost across all industries.
But beyond remediation costs, fines, and lawsuits, financial brands risk losing the one thing customers value most: trust. Effective DevSecOps can reduce this risk by helping teams catch and fix security issues before they reach production, when remediation is faster, cheaper, and more effective.
Moving fast and breaking things might not be an option when financial transactions are at stake, yet finance and banking apps often need to innovate as rapidly as in any other industry. Making them secure without slowing down releases runs into several challenges.
LEARN MORE: Seamless DevSecOps: Integrating security without slowing down development
Security tools often operate outside the core development toolchain. Without integration into CI/CD pipelines, testing becomes inconsistent and disconnected from delivery workflows.
If security tools slow down builds, flood issue queues, or generate false positives, developers quickly lose trust. Effective DevSecOps requires security that’s fast, accurate, and developer-friendly.
Many financial institutions still rely on monolithic systems or outdated codebases that weren’t built for agile or CI/CD practices. Integrating modern security tools into these environments takes careful planning.
Embed security testing early, on every pull request, merge, or build. Use tools like Invicti that integrate directly into CI/CD systems such as Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab, and GitHub Actions to catch vulnerabilities as code is written and committed.
Ensure only the right people can access critical environments and code repositories. Centralize secrets management and enforce least privilege access to reduce insider risk.
Combine dynamic testing (DAST) with static analysis (SAST) and software composition analysis (SCA) to automate security checks at every stage. The goal: detect issues early and verify them automatically to minimize manual triage.
The Invicti AppSec platform was specifically designed with scalable automation in mind to make security a routine part of software quality.
Invicti offers native plugins and REST APIs that fit directly into your CI/CD pipelines, so you can trigger scans automatically without slowing down delivery.
Invicti performs dynamic scanning on running applications and APIs, catching real-world vulnerabilities that SAST can’t see. These scans can be tied to specific pipeline stages—before merge, after deploy, or on demand.
Unlike traditional scanners, Invicti automatically confirms many common vulnerabilities with proof-based scanning. Every confirmed finding includes a proof of exploit, eliminating false positives and accelerating developer remediation.
As some of the most regulated sectors, banking and finance need to take a risk-based approach to application security and cannot afford to check testing boxes for compliance alone.
Set up policy-based rules in your CI/CD pipeline to prevent releases when critical vulnerabilities are detected. With Invicti, you can define severity thresholds and enforce governance without constant manual reviews.
Security doesn’t stop with testing. Invicti’s platform generates detailed, auditable reports for PCI-DSS, SOX, GDPR, and other financial compliance frameworks, making it easier to demonstrate continuous security to regulators and stakeholders.
Financial institutions can’t afford to choose between fast delivery and robust security. With Invicti, you don’t have to.
Our DAST-first approach ensures every application and API is tested in real time, every vulnerability is validated, and every team can fix issues faster, without slowing down the business. Schedule a demo to see how Invicti helps financial organizations embed scalable security into every stage of software development.