News
VASCO Announces Acquisition of Cronto (United Kingdom)
May 2013 by Marc Jacob
VASCO Data Security International, Inc. announced its acquisition of Cronto, of Cambridge (UK), a provider of secure visual transaction authentication solutions for online banking (www.cronto.com ). VASCO acquired all of the stock of Cronto in exchange for an initial cash consideration of Euro 15 million and contingent cash consideration in the form of an earn-out of up to a maximum of Euro 2 million (combined, approximately $21.9 million using the exchange rate of 1.29).
The acquisition was financed from VASCO’s existing cash balances. The acquisition is expected to be dilutive in 2013, due in large part to the amortization of purchased intangible assets. The acquisition is expected to be accretive in 2014.
Cronto was founded in 2005 as a University of Cambridge spin-out and is the market leader in the field of secure visual transaction authentication and signature solutions for online banking applications. The CrontoSign solution (also known as photoTAN) has been chosen to secure transactions of customers of leading German and Swiss banks such as Commerzbank AG and Raiffeisen Switzerland.
Cronto’s patented CrontoSign technology is a simple, user friendly and effective way to withstand even very sophisticated attacks by Trojan malware, targeting online banking services. CrontoSign protects against such attacks as it allows the bank to establish a secure optical communication channel with the client. Account holders can simply “scan” a CrontoSign image displayed on their bank’s website and verify the details of the payment on a trusted display. They can choose between the CrontoSign mobile application or a dedicated CrontoSign hardware device.
VASCO will add the patented CrontoSign products to its offerings for the global banking market.
In a later phase, VASCO anticipates that Cronto’s products will be integrated into MYDIGIPASS.COM, VASCO’s strong authentication platform to secure the consumers’ online applications/accounts.
VASCO expects that Cronto will contribute greatly to VASCO’s future innovation efforts, due to its knowledge and expertise in advanced statistical data analysis and machine learning algorithms that underpins high speed and reliability of image based transactions and due to its close ties with the University of Cambridge.
