VASCO Receives Frost & Sullivan Award

VASCO receives this Award for its leadership in the financial vertical of the hardware authentication devices market. Its flagship products in the hardware authentication devices market are the Digipass line of hardware authentication devices and the VACMAN Controller Server product. The company successfully increased its revenues in 2004 by 31 percent. Its growth in the banking segment, which is comprised entirely of revenues from its banking customers rolling out VASCOs Digipass tokens for e-banking applications to their retail and corporate banking customers, was at an impressive 35 percent. The Digipass line is a complete range of hardware authentication devices comprising the GO-1 and GO-3 one-time password generating tokens, Digipass Pro range of PIN-pad tokens, and the Digipass Pro 800, Digipass Pro 820 and Digipass Pro 850, which are smart card reader based tokens. The suite also features a set of software tokens that support software-based authentication of PCs, handheld devices, and mobile phones. The VACMAN Controller authentication server serves as the backend to authenticate user credentials and connect to the network infrastructure of the customer. With over 350 banks as customers, the total installed base of Digipass tokens touched 13.5 million in 2004. Over 80 percent of the worlds largest deployments of strong user authentication products for retail banking are VASCOs -- including Rabobank (The Netherlands), Fortis (Belgium & the Netherlands), ABN-Amro (The Netherlands), Swedebank (Sweden), SEB (Sweden), Den Norske Bank (Norway), and Zagrebacka Banka (Croatia). In response to the phishing epidemic its customers are facing, VASCO has rolled out a new anti-phishing technology that provides an additional safeguard against the theoretical risk of man-in-the-middle attacks when using a one-time password generating token. It allows the user to send a challenge to the host server to authenticate it. VASCO already has customers in the U.S. banking sector -- Wachovia, Sovereign Bank, ABN-Amro, State Street Bank, Dollar Bank, and Banco Popular -- that are using pilot solutions with a limited number of commercial banking customers, before going in for large-scale retail deployments. VASCO recently announced a partnership with VeriSign, Inc. for distributing its GO-3 tokens supporting the OATH OTP algorithm as part of the VeriSign Unified Authentication offering. This deal is expected to give a major boost to its ability to penetrate the North American markets as they warm up to consumer identity applications. In short, VASCO is well positioned to emerge as a leading player in the consumer identity market the world over and is the deserving recipient of the 2005 Frost & Sullivan Vertical Market Penetration Leadership Award.