According to the article posted on Post & Parcel,”Donahoe rules out USPS digital mailbox, but ID services on radar” | Post & Parcel, Mr. Paul Vogel, former CMO, has been appointed to be the head of the New Digital Solutions Team at USPS. But in his keynote speech for PostalVision 2020, USPS PMG Mr. Patrick Donahoe announced that USPS will NOT offer digital mailboxes.
This is a striking contrast to the announcement earlier this year by Australia Post for their Digital MailBox program.
Canada Post also has a digital mailbox service, and is experimenting to offer such features as secure document storage up to seven years free of charge.
A quick online search reveals that Singapore Post, Swiss Post, Swedish Post, Norwegian Post, Austria Post, and a host of other postal operators are competing with private sector service providers (of which Mr. Donahoe says there are plenty in his market) as well as telecom companies for this service.
If my memory services me right, the whole idea behind the digital mailbox in Sweden was a free email address on the Swedish Post domain for anyone 15 years old and older for life that is linked to their physical address. I recall thinking this is a whole new interpretation of “universal service obligation fulfillment” and has me thinking to this day what the postal USO could and should mean in this day and age of everything digital and mobile.
Mr. Donahoe says something in the order that there are plenty of other digital solutions that have not even been thought of yet that USPS will be looking into, but monetizing them is the real challenge as consumers (as usual) expect digital services to be free.
In terms of ID services, Hongkong Post was the first entity in Hong Kong to be recognized as a digital certification provider in the market. The e-government initiative in Hong Kong has been ongoing for some time now. There are other governments who are investing in e-government processes, but in some cases, posts are not their preferred service partner. This, I suspect, can be attributed in part to the visions the heads and CEOs of postal companies have when lobbying their governments.
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