--- title: "Debite" description: "Customer success story: How Debite built scalable and reliable access controls with Cerbos" customer: "Debite" website: "" canonical: "https://www.cerbos.dev/customers/debite" image: "/assets/use-case-files/social/debite-case-study-url-thumbnail.png" source: "https://www.cerbos.dev/customers/debite" --- # Debite accelerates compliance certification and ships products faster A financing and payments platform uses Cerbos to create centralized, scalable authorization and cut weeks off of their product development. ## At a glance - Saved £200,000 in developer time - Streamlined FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) certification - Launched ahead of schedule > Cerbos enables us to go to market very quickly, compared to an in-house solution. It allows us to offer new products faster as well, because writing new policies or editing them is so easy > > — Engin Attar, Head of Product and Growth, Co-Founder, Debite ### Summary Debite is a financing and payments platform tailored to early-stage startups and high-growth companies in the UK. Their unique corporate cards offer credit limits up to £250k and come with built-in installments that allow founders to spread the cost of their business expenses up to 12 months. Cerbos is an authorization layer for implementing roles and permissions. Debite used Cerbos to build scalable and reliable access controls in their application and eliminated authorization maintenance as a friction point in their product development. They saved at least £200,000 in developer time on the initial setup. They completed their compliance certification ahead of schedule. And editing policies to incorporate new features takes minutes instead of weeks. [Watch the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJ73iJIOfo) ## Introduction ### Building a scalable and reliable solution for managing access controls Debite needed reliable and secure access controls for their new product. It was important to them that they get their authorization system right from the start, but based on past experience, they were concerned that this choice would slow down their product development. “When you're building a company, you pivot, you introduce new products or new features. And it’s very hard to keep updated policies for access controls. So **we wanted an easy solution that we don't have to build again and again,**” says Engin Attar, Head of Product and Growth, and co-founder at Debite. Any financial technology needs secure access controls both in the internal dashboard and in the customer platform. High-security needs to be baked into nearly every aspect of the application. But building roles and permissions, and updating and maintaining access logscan get very time-consuming. It takes time away from building features, and developers hate doing it. ## Requirements ### Security and reliability to satisfy regulations, flexibility to satisfy developers Debite is regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. One of the FCA’s requirements is that financial institutions have reliable disaster recovery systems in place. “It was important not to have a single failure point,” Engin shares. The system they use to manage access controls within their application needs to have fail-safes in place so that they can mitigate any risk of security breaches. To serve the interest of smoother product development, Engin knew that they needed a centralized, secure and scalable way of managing access control. And they needed it immediately, so it had be quick and easy to implement to not take up too much of their time. > Cerbos helped us go through the compliance process so much easier and smoother than compared to an in-house solution. We were able to get the required disaster recovery certificates much faster. > > — Engin Attar, Head of Product and Growth, Co-Founder, Debite ## Evaluation ### Easy to implement and great for compliance Debite’s development team, their CTO, and the backend team were involved in the Cerbos integration process. “It took us a couple of weeks to implement it, while also working on some other stuff as well,” Engin says, “The Cerbos APIs were great. It's very fast to write and implement new policies.” They found the documentation to be self-explanatory and were able to implement Cerbos in the back end and the front end to handle user permissions and access policies. When they develop new products, provide new access controls, or if there's any company specifically requiring a new access type, it's easy for the Debite team to create or edit a policy. “It was important for us to be able to add new user profiles, one after another when we are building new products. It enabled us to ship our products faster.”, Engin says. Debite also benefited from Cerbos’ features in satisfying their compliance requirements. The horizontal scaling model and automatic audit trails gave Debite critical capabilities for ensuring the reliability of their access controls. “We are working with a bank called Modulr, we use their EMI (electronic money institute) license. **Cerbos helped us go through the compliance process so much easier and smoother than compared to an in-house solution. We were able to get the required disaster recovery certificates much faster,**” Engin says. > It just works, we are using it in the back office and in the front end. We don‘t have to think about it, and it‘s a time saver for us. > > — Engin Attar, Head of Product and Growth, Co-Founder, Debite ## Results ### Security, compliance, and the power to ship products faster With Cerbos, Debite built scalable and reliable access controls. Engin and his team take advantage of Cerbos’ capability to streamline policy updates to ship their products and go to market quickly. **“One thing is for sure - we would've launched later than we did,”** Engin shares, “Our technical team would be dealing with daily stuff regarding access controls and access logs. With Cerbos we don't have to spend any time on that.” Engin continues, “**If we wanted to create the same solution for ourselves, I think it would have cost us easily £200,000. And we would have probably missed things, like logging certain actions.** With Cerbos you don't have to think about that. Having a built-in logging functionality gave us a sense of trust.” Deploying Cerbos provided Debite with a scalable and efficient authorization layer that saves them hours of ongoing maintenance time, and helps them get things done faster. “Instead of writing access controls and access logs for yourself, using Cerbos will make your life so much easier. Because it gives you an easy-to-use platform to do all of this, with minimal effort from the development team and the product team. **It's reliable. It's fast, and it's, most importantly, a time saver.**” says Engin. #### Related links - Full interview with Engin Attar - 9fin modifies product packaging in 10 minutes - Nook onboards 3x more users by implementing granular roles and permissions #### Learn more about Cerbos features - Security standards - Scalability - Audit logs - Centralized management