VASCO: Telling it as it is

The clarity and succinctness of VASCO's descriptions of itself are rare enough among company websites to merit close attention.

The Site

VASCO provides organisations with authentication programmes and devices for their online commerce and data security. A one-sentence statement on its home page expresses this as “…solutions that enable secure e-business and e-commerce, protect sensitive information, and safeguard the identity of users”.

This is expanded in the About VASCO section’s Corporate Overview, a single page that provides a lengthier (14 lines) description in plain direct English of the company’s products and its customer base. For instance: “VASCO’s Identity Authentication software is delivered via its Digipass security products, small ‘calculator’ hardware devices carried by an end user, or in….”; or “VASCO’s target markets are the applications and their several hundred million users that utilize fixed passwords as security.”

Following this is the company’s Corporate Mission and nine ‘bite-size’ “facts about VASCO”.

The Takeaway

The clarity and succinctness of VASCO’s descriptions of itself are rare enough among company websites – let alone those of technology providers – to merit close attention. Apart from its reflex use of “solutions” (pure provider jargon) it employs simple everyday language and editorial restraint to convey a clear ‘thumbnail’ portrait of itself.

The impression this creates goes beyond putting itself across in terms that chime with the way its potential clients think and speak. By being so articulate, VASCO communicates a confident, focused understanding of what it does and why that is valuable. An assured use of ‘key facts’ rounds out an overview that delivers a substantial amount of information with a commendable economy of words. So much so it manages to include the Corporate Mission and remain digestible.

First published on 23 November, 2004