VASCO Bags Frost & Sullivan Award for Leadership in the Financial Vertical with its Hardware Authentication Devices
biz.yahoo.com
Thursday May 19, 7:45 am ET
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 2005--Frost & Sullivan in the latest research service World Hardware Authentication Devices F302-74, recognized VASCO Data Security International, Inc. (NASDAQ:VDSI) as the recipient of the 2005 Vertical Market Penetration Leadership Award. Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this Award to a company that most effectively penetrates its industry's vertical markets.
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 VASCO's 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.
"VASCO's forte has been in securing e-banking applications such as online banking, share trading, and high-value financial transfers by corporate and retail customers," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Zubin Baben. "VASCO's banking and financial customers around the world typically deploy its authentication platform to enable two-factor authentication for the corporate and retail customers."
With over 350 banks as customers, the total installed base of Digipass tokens touched 13.5 million in 2004. Over 80 percent of the world's largest deployments of strong user authentication products for retail banking are VASCO's -- 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.
"Although based in the United States, over 80 percent of VASCO's sales come from Europe," notes Baben. "Nonetheless, the company is actively pursuing the top 50 banks in the United States and has opened new sales offices in the US in 2004, as well as offices in other growing regions such as Asia. VASCO with its wide experience and impressive set of references in the European banking market is expected to repeat its success in the emerging consumer identity market in North America."
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. |
