Qatar Post plans bank statement service
Qatar’s General Postal Corporation (Q-Post) plans to offer service to banks in which they will print bank statements which will then be mailed directly to bank customers, Ali Mohammad Al Ali, the Q-Post chairman, said.
The corporation plans to take on new services and increase its autonomy so that it can eventually be listed on the Doha Securities Market, he added. In an interview with Q-Post’s in-house magazine’s latest issue, Ali said: ” We now offer electricity bill payment, driving licence renewals and similar schemes and we operate post rooms for some banks. We are shortly to begin bank statement printing. There is a swathe of work available and we aim to proactively capture as much as we can.”
He said that the Q-Post wanted to take on work that is traditionally not undertaken by a postal department and become a completely autonomous body, which could be floated like a company on the Doha Securities Market.
He said that since Q-Post became autonomous in 2001, its salary costs have reduced by 28 per cent while the annual income had grown by 49 per cent over the last three years while operational costs dropped by three per cent.
He said that salary costs were lowered despite the corporation employing some high earning personnel in its IT department. He noted that the best achievement among all was the recovery from a pre-2001 loss of QR7.2m to a profit of QR4.6m last year, which helped reduce the drain on the national exchequer and ensured greater autonomy for Q-Post.
Meanwhile, Ali lamented that the biggest problem that confronts Q-Post was the late answers for delivery enquiries of the Express Mail Service (EMS) items sent from Qatar. ” We believe the EMS should be the flagship service across the industry.
Some developed countries fail to check incoming EMS traffic and then deny receiving a missing item. Not enough countries provide track-and-trace facilities for EMS and parcels through the Internet and we see these as essential, given that our competitors promote this facility,” he said. He noted that locally, Q-Post was battling for an attitude change which was essential to enhance the corporation’s status. ” Poor quality mail from certain countries also causes us headaches,” he added.
Poor quality mail means those that has not been properly processed by the sending country and does not bear sufficient data to ensure delivery.
