Cronto Limited is a leading provider of secure transaction authentication solutions for online banking. It was established to exploit the commercial opportunity for the innovative technology – Cronto's visual cryptogram – by its co-founders and inventors, Igor Drokov and Elena Punskaya.

The concept of the Cronto visual cryptogram and the development of visual signing technology was born out of leading edge engineering research undertaken at the University of Cambridge and has been evaluated and endorsed by the acknowledged world authorities in cryptography and data security.

Cronto has taken this unique advance in security technology and applied it to the current business challenges of internet banking and transaction authorisation.

Internet banking is now a mass-market product that is demanded as an essential service by increasing numbers of bank customers. More and more people rely upon the convenience and ease of use of internet banking services in their daily life. More and more, the quality of a bank's internet banking service can affect the overall level of satisfaction and loyalty of its customers.

Ironically, the growing availability and popularity of internet banking has created the biggest challenge to its continued viability and growth. Fraudsters are attracted by the huge potential for on-line theft and are posing increasingly sophisticated and effective threats to the security of customer transactions carried out over the internet. Banks and other financial organisations urgently need to find ways of implementing strong, effective security in their systems that do not compromise the quality of their customers' experience.

Cronto's mission is to facilitate the deployment of secure solutions based upon visual signing that both meet the approval of the customers that use them, and can be deployed cost-effectively and in confidence by any banking organisation.

Adrian Parton (Non Executive Chairman)
Adrian is a serial entrepreneur with a demonstrated track record of growing international technology businesses in multiple market areas. Adrian is currently the Founder and CEO of Matrix MicroScience, a leading diagnostic company in the area of rapid detection of food-borne pathogens. He is also the Founder & CEO of KliniSep Ltd, a start up in the healthcare sector focused on diagnostics for rapid MRSA detection. Prior to Matrix, Adrian was the Founder and CEO of Genera Technologies, a leading manufacturer of test kits for cryptosporidium in water, acquired by IDEXX Laboratories, Inc in 2000. He is also Chairman of Objective Imaging, a software/hardware business offering automated imaging applications. Adrian holds a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from University of Lancaster and a Ph.D. from University of Birmingham.

Igor Drokov (CEO and Founder)
Having worked with Anacubis(i2) and Isocra, Igor's experience includes distributed software applications development for both enterprise and consumer-oriented systems, delivered to Priceline.com, Salomon Smith Barney, Instinet. Igor holds a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, UK, and M.Sci. in Engineering from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Russia.

Elena Punskaya (CTO and Founder)
Prior to co-founding Cronto, Elena was Research Team Leader at biotech software startup Bluegnome Ltd, a Research Fellow in Cambridge University Engineering Department, a Junior Research Fellow of Homerton College, University of Cambridge, and an independent consultant in the area of telecomminications. She is also a Fellow of Homerton College, University of Cambridge. Elena holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK, as well as M.Sci. in Engineering from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Russia.

Jonathan Bell (Non Executive Director)
Jonathan has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry and is currently VP of product marketing in OpenCloud. Prior to OpenCloud, he worked as an independent consultant specializing in complete product conception and definition primarily for the telecoms space, and was one of the founding management team of leading telecoms billing start-up Geneva Technology where he remained as VP of product strategy when Geneva was acquired by Convergys. Jonathan is a Chartered Engineer and has a degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Bristol.

Matthew Pemble
Matthew is an experienced security architect and operational manager, having worked for numerous international commercial and voluntary organisations, as well as for the UK government. Much of his recent experience has been in the combatting online fraud and other attacks against e-commerce and banking systems. Having led the Information Security Incident Response Team for Royal Bank of Scotland Group for 5 years, he has now returned to consultancy, working in the security unit of an independent software testing company. A Fellow of the British Computer Society and a founder member of the Institute of Information Security Professionals, Matthew holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and is a European Engineer, a Chartered Engineer, and holds the CISSP, CFE and CISM credentials.

Sir Richard Dearlove
Sir Richard is Master of Pembroke College Cambridge, and was Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service until July 2004.

Professor William J. Fitzgerald
William is Professor of Applied Statistics and Signal Processing and Head of Research at the Signal Processing Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK. Prior to joining Cambridge, he worked at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, for 7 years and was then a Professor of Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, for 5 years. He is well known for his work on Bayesian inference applied to signal and data modeling, and is the author of numerous papers and patents. He maintains active relationships with industry and technology investors, and is a Fellow of Christs College, Cambridge, UK.