Financial Services & FinTech
Autonomous offensive security for the institutions adversaries target most.
Industry Solutions
Business reasons and regulatory frameworks driving AEV investments in financial services and fintech
OUR WHY
Ares for Financial Services & FinTech
The institutions adversaries target most can no longer afford point-in-time defense.
Banking has been an API business for years; the only thing that has changed is who else figured that out. Open banking standards moved customer data onto programmatic rails. Real-time payment networks made fraud irreversible at the speed of an API call. Embedded finance pushed your products into other people's apps, often behind authentication you do not control. Banking-as-a-Service turned the chartered institution into a backend for an ecosystem of fintechs, each with their own attack surface and their own consequence sharing. And the adversary economy has scaled to match: financial services reported more breaches than any other sector in 2025, with API-related fraud losses now exceeding four billion dollars a year. The pattern across the headline incidents — Marquis, 700Credit, TransUnion — is not phishing. It is the API. Meanwhile your regulators are no longer accepting "we tested it last year" as a control. PCI DSS 4.0, NYDFS Part 500's amended cyber requirements, the SEC's cyber disclosure rules, FFIEC guidance, and the EU's DORA all now expect demonstrable, continuous evidence. Ares closes that gap — autonomously, continuously, and across the full attack surface that modern finance actually runs on.
The Threat Surface
The attack surface modern finance was built on, and never staffed to defend.
The modern financial institution is not a system. It is a federation of APIs spanning core banking, payments, lending, wealth, and crypto, each with its own trust boundary and its own integration sprawl. Open banking APIs expose customer accounts to a long tail of third-party providers your appsec team did not build and cannot fully audit. Banking-as-a-Service APIs put your chartered infrastructure behind fintech apps you do not control, where one broken authorization check becomes your regulatory finding, not theirs. Real-time payment rails — FedNow, RTP, SEPA Instant — turned fraud into a one-shot, irreversible event the moment an authorization flaw lets it through. Mobile banking apps on iOS and Android face credential-stuffing and account-takeover automation at industrial scale. Treasury and corporate banking portals carry seven- and eight-figure wire authority behind authentication that was not designed for adversarial scrutiny. Wealth and trading platforms expose APIs that move positions in milliseconds. Crypto custody and exchange APIs manage instruments whose theft is final. Loan origination systems process the most sensitive PII any consumer surrenders. And underneath all of it, vendor APIs — the Marquis Software vector — give one compromised supplier the keys to hundreds of institutions at once. No annual third-party assessment can keep pace with that surface. Ares can.
The Ares Platform
Autonomous offensive security, purpose-built for the speed and consequence of modern finance.
Ares deploys a coordinated swarm of AI agents against your APIs, web applications, and mobile apps. Each agent is purpose-built — for reconnaissance, exploit synthesis, kill-chain execution, and validation — and they work together the way a real adversary would. Our API agents enumerate and test the endpoints behind your core banking, payments, lending, wealth, and BaaS platforms, including the shadow APIs that microservice and partner-integration sprawl generate faster than anyone documents, with full coverage of the OWASP API Security Top 10 and the chained business-logic attacks that scanners cannot see: broken object authorization on customer accounts, replay against real-time payment rails, privilege escalation through embedded finance flows, transaction tampering across open banking endpoints, vendor-API trust abuse of the kind that turned a single supplier into eighty-plus institutional breaches. Our web agents probe authentication, session handling, and authorization across retail banking portals, treasury platforms, trading interfaces, and customer onboarding flows. Our mobile agents test iOS and Android banking apps end-to-end — the apps where account takeover, fraudulent transfers, and credential-stuffing economies are quietly compounding. And every test runs production-safely, with severity-tiered findings, operator attribution, and full evidentiary chains — so your team can run Ares continuously against production, against staging, and against every release candidate before it touches a customer dollar.
Outcomes that matter to financial services security leaders.
Ares is built to move the metrics that show up in your board deck, your 10-K disclosures, and your examiner conversations, not the ones that decorate a dashboard. It prevents the API-mediated breaches that have replaced phishing as the dominant intrusion path into financial institutions. It hardens real-time payment infrastructure where fraud is irreversible the moment a flaw is exploited. It de-risks the third-party and vendor API ecosystem that adversaries now target as a single shared backdoor into hundreds of institutions. It eliminates the broken authorization and business-logic flaws in open banking, BaaS, and embedded finance that turn one fintech partner's bug into your regulatory action. It defends mobile banking against the account-takeover automation operating against the sector around the clock. And it gives you audit-grade evidence of continuous offensive testing for PCI DSS 4.0, NYDFS Part 500, the SEC cyber disclosure regime, GLBA, FFIEC, and DORA — replacing point-in-time pentest snapshots with a defensible, always-on record. Ares was built by operators who have spent decades on the other side of this work, and financial services is where that work is best documented. Our founder authored Scorched Earth, the research that breached fifty banks and cryptocurrency exchanges through insecure APIs and was subsequently cited in U.S. Congressional proceedings. She is a contributing author to the OWASP API Security Top 10 — the standard your auditors hold you to — and has presented on financial-sector API security at Money20/20 across multiple years, at DEFCON, and to the institutions adversaries target most. When Ares tests your environment, it tests it the way the most patient, most resourced adversary would. The difference is that this time, the report comes to you.
TEAM
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