How MX Used Prime to Scale Product Security Without Adding Headcount
"Prime gives me the ability to support the speed and volume of product and engineering initiatives. When it comes to security architecture, I'm able to be three to five people with this tool."
4×
security review capacity
100%
security coverage across new product features
About
MX is a financial data platform that powers secure data access, analytics, and personalized money experiences for banks, fintechs, and financial institutions. Its product capabilities span data aggregation, enrichment, APIs, and customer-facing financial tools. Given that the company operates in a regulated, high-trust environment, security is foundational to the business. The engineering organization ships continuously across distributed systems that process sensitive financial data which increases both the velocity and security criticality of every release.
The Challenge
As MX’s product surface area grew, so did the demand for security involvement across design reviews, architectural changes, and new feature development. However, the security review engagements were limited by available staffing. This created several compounding challenges:
- Growing review backlog: The volume of features, design docs, and architectural changes requiring security input began to outpace what one architect could manually review
- Context switching overload: Deep reviews, threat modeling, advisory work, and incident readiness competed for limited time
- Uneven security engagement: Teams with strong security instincts moved faster, while others required more hands-on guidance
- Scaling security ownership: Security could not remain centralized without becoming a bottleneck, but decentralization without guardrails introduced risk
At the same time, MX was intentionally investing in a Security Champions program to embed security knowledge directly into engineering teams. The challenge was ensuring champions could operate consistently, confidently, and in alignment with product security expectations, without overwhelming the architect responsible for governance. MX needed a way to scale security impact, not just effort.
Working with Prime
As MX’s product velocity increased, it became clear that it needed a trusted, automated force multiplier that could scale security coverage without sacrificing quality, consistency, or governance. MX adopted Prime Security to operationalize this model. Prime became the foundation that allowed MX to scale security across a fast-growing fintech product surface without becoming a bottleneck.
From Review Backlog to Continuous Security Coverage
Before Prime, security reviews were constrained by human availability. As feature velocity increased, backlog pressure was unavoidable. With Prime:
- All planned engineering work receives security evaluation, not just what can be manually reviewed
- Coverage automatically scales with development velocity
- Security reviews no longer depend on synchronous architect availability
MX no longer has to choose between depth or breadth, Prime delivers both, transforming security reviews from a queue into continuous coverage.
Consistent, High-Quality Reviews Across Teams
Decentralizing security through Champions introduces risk when decisions vary by team or individual. Prime solves this by acting as a single, consistent source of security analysis:
- Reviews and threat models follow a repeatable, structured format
- Risk analysis is consistent across features, services, and teams
- Security expectations are explicit, not inferred
Champions move faster because guidance is clear, consistent, and trusted. Prime enabled scale without diluting security standards.
Freeing the Architect to Focus on High-Impact Decisions
As a Product Security Architect, the highest value is not repetitive reviews, but novel achitectures, high-risk design decision and exceptions, and governance and risk acceptance. Prime handles the analysis at scale, allowing the architect to:
- Govern outcomes instead of producing every review
- Focus on the work that truly requires human judgment
- Maintain confidence that nothing critical is missed
Enabling Security Champions to Move Fast and Safely
Prime became a daily enabler for MX’s Security Champions. Champions use Prime-generated reviews and threat models as primary technical input, security questions are answered early, in context, and teams proceed without waiting for manual approval. This reduces friction while raising the overall security bar. Prime empowers champions to act independently, without the risk of inconsistency.
Outcomes
With Prime embedded into their product security workflow, MW saw:
- ~4× increase in effective security review throughput
- Significant reduction in security review backlog
- Consistent security coverage across all new features
- Security Champions operate with confidence and clarity
- Centralized governance is preserved without slowing delivery
"The most significant result [of working with Prime] has been the acceleration of our product security review lifecycle. The tool has optimized it and reduced turnaround time by synthesizing vast amounts of context."
Looking Ahead