In 1996, I started my professional career in a Belgian company called Digipass. Just one month after I joined, the company was acquired by an American firm, and Vasco Data Security was born.
At the beginning, I worked within the R&D team on the development of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. During this period, I had the opportunity to contribute to numerous IVR projects, especially for Belgian and Luxembourg banks, as well as for companies such as Dolmen (Colruyt), Delfood, Ring Ring, and several others.
After about a year, I moved on to the firmware development of Digipass devices (models 300 / 500 / 600 / 700). My work mainly involved integrating and optimizing a range of security encryption algorithms, drivers, and other components in assembler code, running on Samsung KS56/57 microchips (Triple DES, Guardian, etc.).
I also contributed to the development of DES/RSA card drivers on Unix systems, as well as various tools used to initialize Digipass products. An important part of this journey was the assembler development of Digipass on 4-bit microprocessors, within a very small team of just a few people. It was an intense, challenging, and fun experience that really shaped my career.
During that period, the development pace was intense, often leading to late-night sessions fueled by pizza and Coca-Cola paid by the company. Sometimes, we even had snowball fights inside the office building, which brought a lot of laughter and team spirit. And who could forget the Friday afternoon technical meetings, always accompanied by a tart kindly brought by Frank?
What made this period even more memorable was the chance to work with exceptional people such as Frank, Phil, JMZ, Hugo, Anselme, Filip, Olivier, Bart, Eric, and many others.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, the top management did not always give much recognition for the work accomplished. However, looking back today, I consider it as one of the best and most rewarding experiences of my career, during the early days of what felt like a real startup adventure.
