Building a Secure Payments Platform Before Product Launch: How Push Engineered Security from Day One

Push is building a modern payments infrastructure designed for platforms and marketplaces that manage complex financial flows. With a founding team from Plaid, Push understands that embedding secure architecture early is critical—not only to protect sensitive financial data but also to remove obstacles in future product scaling and enterprise partnerships.

In financial services, security isn’t just a technical requirement—it’s foundational to the business model. Without strong security and compliance controls, payment platforms face delays in market access, stalled enterprise deals, and increasing operational risks as data environments grow more complex.

The Challenge: Pre-Product Security with Fintech-Grade Expectations

Before launching its first product, Push faced a problem common to high-growth fintech startups: how to build an infrastructure that could support rigorous security and compliance standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, without slowing down product development.

The team needed to establish secure defaults across its cloud environments, align policies to engineering workflows, and prepare for external audits—all with limited in-house compliance resources and an aggressive product timeline.

The VioletX Approach: Embedded, Execution-Driven Support

Push partnered with VioletX not as external advisors, but as an extension of their technical and compliance teams. The VioletX model goes beyond governance checklists—focusing instead on how compliance frameworks map directly to the technology stack and day-to-day engineering practices.

• Framework Implementation Aligned to Engineering Workflows:
  VioletX worked alongside Push’s engineering teams to design a SOC 2 control framework that didn’t just satisfy audit requirements, but fit naturally into how Push writes code, deploys infrastructure, and manages data. This included reviewing AWS architecture, implementing secure defaults, and integrating monitoring and evidence collection directly into CI/CD pipelines.
• Policy and Control Development with Technical Context:
  Rather than deliver generic policy templates, VioletX helped write controls and documentation that reflected the realities of Push’s early-stage architecture—enabling faster adoption and operationalization by engineering leadership.
• Execution Support Through Audit Readiness:
  VioletX didn’t stop at documentation. Their team worked through vulnerability backlogs, prioritized remediations based on real risk to the business, and directly supported engineering in preparing for audit walkthroughs. This hands-on model ensured that security controls were both real and defensible.
• Tooling and Automation for Continuous Compliance:
  Recognizing the need to stay lean, VioletX introduced and helped configure modern security compliance tools to automate evidence collection and ongoing monitoring, reducing the manual overhead often associated with compliance in early-stage companies.

The Outcome: A Security Program That Scales with the Business

By working with VioletX, Push achieved its SOC 2 Type I certification before product launch, positioning the company to accelerate customer acquisition and meet the due diligence requirements of future enterprise partners.

Just as importantly, Push now operates with a security and compliance framework that is embedded in its engineering practices, allowing the company to maintain a strong security posture as its infrastructure and customer base grow.

• Established secure architecture and controls before customer data entered the environment.
• Avoided technical debt by designing audit-ready processes aligned with real engineering workflows.
• Built a compliance foundation that supports future frameworks, including ISO 27001.

For companies operating in highly regulated industries like fintech, this is what modern security maturity looks like—purpose-built for scale, without slowing velocity.

Learn more about how Push operationalized security from day one on the Vanta Blog →