Lean security team

With a single full-time security lead and growing demand across multiple product teams, Lead Bank needed a more scalable way to manage rising review requests and maintain consistent oversight.

Manual and inconsistent reviews

Security reviews were performed manually, slowing down development and leaving gaps in coverage and resulting in an inconsistent security standard.

Difficulty prioritizing risks

Without a consistent framework, it was hard to connect findings from pen tests, audits, and ad hoc reviews, making it unclear which risks needed attention first.

Automated security reviews

Automated design reviews were integrated directly into engineering workflows, enabling the lean security team to scale coverage without adding headcount. Reviews now run continuously against design documents, roadmaps, and infrastructure plans.

Standardized review process

A consistent set of security checks covering IAM hardening, secure data storage, and OWASP Top 10 risks was codified into every review. This eliminated variability and ensured a reliable baseline across projects.

Contextual risk prioritization

Reviews surfaced findings in ranked order of impact, correlating design issues with pen test and audit results. This gave both security and engineering teams clarity on which issues to address first.

Building a scalable and proactive
security review process

Lead Bank’s security team faced a growing workload with limited resources. With only one engineer dedicated to product security, manual reviews created a bottleneck. Design documents often lived across Google Drive, Confluence, or even personal folders, making it difficult for security to know where risks might be hidden, and each assessment required reading lengthy documents, finding and extracting context, and drafting requirements from scratch. It was a slow process that limited how many projects the team could support.

With Clover, design reviews are now fully automated and integrated into the team’s existing tools. Findings appear directly in Slack and Jira as new documents are created, giving engineers real-time feedback without disrupting their workflow. For the security team, it means doing more with less - reviewing more designs, surfacing more issues, and keeping pace with the business.

Embedding security into design-led workflows

Lead Bank’s manual reviews were historically driven by past experience and personal judgment. There were no consistent rules for what should be flagged, and security checks often varied from one service to another. This made it hard to enforce standards and ensure equal scrutiny across initiatives resulting in variability in quality, delayed feedback, and missed opportunities to catch issues earlier in the design process.

With Clover, a consistent set of security checks is automatically applied to every review by integrating directly with the team’s design repositories and applying best practices like AWS Well-Architected and OWASP ASVS into every review out-of-the-box. What once took hours now takes minutes. Even legacy documentation became actionable, helping the team build a consistent backlog of risks and apply the same security lens across products from lending to real-time payments.

Prioritizing the risks that matter most

Without a consistent risk framework, Lead Bank’s security team often found itself triaging long lists of issues with no clear sense of priority. Developers were unsure what needed fixing first, and security lacked the data to defend decisions or accelerate reviews ahead of audits or compliance efforts.

Clover changed that by mapping findings to industry frameworks and presenting risks in ranked order of impact and likelihood. This allowed the team to conduct faster, more defensible risk assessments, prioritize confidently, and ensure the most critical issues were addressed first.

Scaling product security for long-term resilience

Looking ahead, Lead Bank is focused on strengthening its product security program by expanding automated reviews across all services, improving visibility into critical applications, and aligning security standards with future regulatory needs. With consistent coverage in place and prioritized risks addressed, the team can now shift attention to embedding security into every stage of product development. By making automated reviews a standard part of the engineering workflow, Lead Bank is building a scalable, resilient security model that will support innovation and growth for years to come.