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# Use Case

## Modernizing and future-proofing a digital bank

Banking is now a digital business. High-quality digital experiences are now a top priority to be competitive. “We see very successful banks in Europe, America, and Asia completely digital native, and they have millions of customers now. And users are already used to the same user experience that big tech brands give you, like Google and Netflix,” says Edgar, “And so you’ve got to compete by providing the same user experience and fast value to the customer.”

And with Fintech being a relatively new sector, **regulations for fintech like ISO27001, SOC2, GDPR, PSD2, CCPA, are constantly evolving. That means your architecture needs to be designed for constant change.** So applications need to be designed for change. 

**4G’s existing authorization model didn’t scale and was gathering technical debt.** They were using roles and user groups from Google Workspace, but their role requirements were changing and Google didn’t have the right capabilities to meet their requirements. 

4G’s team needed a way to **synchronize authorization across internal and external apps and services in a more modern architecture.** That included incorporating authorization in serverless environments, and keeping their authorization lightweight and flexible while maintaining their security standards.


 

# Requirements

## Flexibility 
Edgar wanted his team to deliver frequent releases, to constantly test and iterate features, constantly improve user experience, and smoothly adapt to changing regulatory requirements in the markets where they operate. “Products are live things,” says Edgar “You gotta have that flexibility, otherwise it's very hard to deliver quickly and to innovate.”


## Auditable and secure 
Edgar wanted his team to deliver frequent releases, to constantly test and iterate features, constantly improve user experience, and smoothly adapt to changing regulatory requirements in the markets where they operate. “Products are live things,” says Edgar “You gotta have that flexibility, otherwise it's very hard to deliver quickly and to innovate.”

## Dynamic and fine-grained access control
4G wanted their access controls to fit the real-life use cases of the financial operations that are taking place in their application, and the different user types of the application. They weren’t going to settle for a ‘set it and forget it’ approach. Users and employees come and go, and the regulatory environment changes all the time, especially in fintech.

 

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# Results

## Millions of dollars saved and precious time reclaimed

By switching to Cerbos for authorization, **Edgar estimates 4G Capital is saving over $264K per year (or $22K per month).** 

“We were about to scale our existing platform to all branches in Kenya. And when we looked at the performance of the Lambda authorization service and the cost, we were saying Oh my God, this is going to cost us a lot of money.”

Managing authorization in the backend of 4G capital’s application used to involve hours or days hardcoding changes, complicated re-deployments, and a whole separate service just to test policies. **Managing Cerbos PDPs through Cerbos Hub reduces authorization maintenance work to minutes.** 4G’s authorization policies are automatically synchronized throughout their architecture, eliminating potential vulnerabilities from an incomplete roll-out. 

Edgar shares, “It's quite easy to see what the policies do, and also very easy to update them. With the CI/CD feature you update a new policy and it automatically pushes latest version to the PDPs.” 

 
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## Fine-grained, adaptable policies with enhanced security and auditability

4G Capital can now easily implement and manage **highly granular, attribute-based authorization policies.** They can control access to resources and actions based on user attributes, resource attributes, relationships, and contextual factors.

By decoupling authorization logic from their application code, **4G can modify policies centrally and propagate changes across services without requiring code redeploys.** Whether product or regulation changes require updates to authorization policies, it’s easy to communicate between stakeholders and write new policies that fit the new use case, then push the changes right away instead of taking a full development cycle. 

Cerbos maintains a central log of all authorization decisions, so 4G Capital has a clear audit trail for compliance and security investigations. And it’s easy for the internal team to monitor performance and detect potential issues.



### Related links
* <a href="https://youtu.be/LBjH8KUY5oc">Future-proofing fintech in the age of cloud and microservices - Webinar with 4G Capital</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/customers/9fin">9fin modifies product packaging in 10 minutes</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/customers/withloop">Loop secuires air-gapped cash machines with Cerbos</a>
### Learn more about Cerbos
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/scalability">Scalability</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/abac">ABAC (Attribute-based access control)</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/audit-logs">Audit logs</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/centralized-management">Centralized management</a>

$264k saved per year by switching authorization services

From requirements to production in minutes instead of a full development cycle.

Policies are updated in minutes when requirements change

A digital bank replaces their legacy authorization service with Cerbos and improves their cost-efficiency.

Customer success story: 4G Capital saves a quarter-million dollars per year with Cerbos

4G Capital

We got the foundation set. Now we can scale and include more complex policies. And we can grow in the right direction and with the right security.

It was very important to have full governance around access control. If you want to scale, if you want to go to other countries, you need to nail these things.

It's quite easy to see what the policies do, and also very easy to update them. With the CI/CD feature you update a new policy and it automatically pushes latest version to the PDPs.

Success story

4G Capital saves a quarter-million dollars per year with Cerbos

Case Study