Outsourced Risk: FinTech’s Strongest Link Is Its Weakest

The greatest cybersecurity threat facing fintech companies today doesn’t reside on their networks, but rather inside the complex, often opaque ecosystems of their partners,with implications that stretch across the global financial landscape, according to a report from SecurityScorecard.

It’s a quiet kind of cyber crisis—one that unfolds not inside firewalls but far beyond them. SecurityScorecard’s Defending the Financial Supply Chain analyzed 250 of the world’s most prominent fintech companies (Security Scorecard, 2025). On the surface, the findings seemed encouraging: fintech firms scored an impressive median cybersecurity rating of 90. More than half earned an “A.” 

But underneath that sheen of resilience lies a disturbing reality. More than 53 percent of cyber incidents in fintech came not from within the organizations but through third- and fourth-party vendors. Specifically: 41.8 percent of breaches were attributed to third-party vendors, including software providers, cloud hosts, and API partners. Additionally, 11.9 percent were traced back to fourth-party relationships—the vendors of those vendors. That figure is more than twice the global average.

This means that Fintechs are arguably better-resourced and more digitally mature than many other sectors. Yet, SecurityScorecard’s data points to an industry-wide blind spot: cyber risk has moved from endpoints and networks to integrations and dependencies. 

Fourth-party risk—when an unknown dependency of a vendor becomes compromised—is increasingly common. The fact that fintechs are twice as likely as the global average to experience fourth-party incidents highlights a significant lack of visibility.

There’s an ironic twist in all of this. High internal security ratings may breed overconfidence. When internal security metrics look pristine, there’s a tendency to assume the entire ecosystem is secure. But SecurityScorecard’s report is clear: internal hygiene does not equal ecosystem integrity. Case in point: nearly one in five (18.4 percent) of fintech firms experienced a publicly reported breach. And nearly a third of those had been breached more than once. In many cases, the breach vectors were long-known vulnerabilities, such as misconfigured cloud storage or missing SPF records on email domains.

In response, the company’s STRIKE unit issued a detailed set of recommendations:

• Contractual Reform: Vendors should be required to disclose their downstream dependencies and notify clients immediately upon discovery of a breach.
• Risk Reclassification: Firms should abandon spend-based vendor tiering and instead focus on breach history and integration depth.
• Credential Defense: Reused credentials and MFA gaps remain low-hanging fruit for attackers. Firms should actively monitor leaked credentials and enforce adaptive authentication.
• Technical Audits: File transfer tools, cloud providers, and API gateways need regular security validation. Assumptions must be tested.

This isn’t just about data. Fintech now powers core banking, digital wallets, neobanks, and cross-border payments. The lines between FinTech’s and traditional financial institutions are blurring. A failure in one component—especially via a shared third party—can ripple outward.

If a critical vendor in payment processing is compromised, millions of transactions can be delayed, reversed, or manipulated. If a customer communications platform is breached, phishing becomes indistinguishable from legitimate outreach.

The new perimeter in cybersecurity isn’t the edge of your network—it’s the edge of your influence. And for many FinTech’s, that edge is dangerously thin.