NZ Post signs up to Zumbox’s digital platform

New Zealand Post has signed a license agreement to make use of the Zumbox platform as a basis for new digital postal mail services. The postal operator has received a national exclusive right to use the internet-based digital mailbox technology from the California-based company, it was revealed yesterday.

Zumbox launched its paperless postal mail platform last May in the United States, and has since been attracting mailing companies to make use of the system to send secure electronic documents to online versions of their customers’ physical mailboxes.

The company also set up a separate division last year to offer the software as a “white-label” platform for Posts, and even mailers themselves, to deploy locally and adopt as the basis of their own branded services.

John Payne, Zumbox CEO, told Post&Parcel yesterday that he believed a Post could fully implement a Zumbox-based digital mail service within 90 days of buying the license, although New Zealand Post have not announced a deployment schedule.

The Post will be trying out various different digital postal mail service options to see which one is most accepted by its customers. The Zumbox platform is designed primarily to manage transactional mail, but also has the potential for other offerings including marketing materials.

“They are going to be trying a variety of different services, and will let the market decide,” he said.

Paperless

New Zealand has around 1.45m households, with research from last year suggesting 77% of consumers would be likely to use a digital post network if available.

According to the research, commissioned by the New Zealand Post from The Research Agency, the average consumer would likely opt out of 59% of their physical mail through a digital service, while 42% of consumers believed they would go more than 80% paperless.

Sohail Choudhry, general manager for integrated communications at New Zealand Post, said: “We have identified a clear interest — both among consumers and businesses — in a digital postal system here in New Zealand, and we are eager to test this service on the Zumbox Platform.”

New Zealand Post is the first Post to go public with its intention to use the Zumbox system, although Zumbox said it is currently working with a number of other Posts – and commercial mailers – at present.

Payne said his company is generally working with Posts in first world countries, rather than operators in developing nations.

“We are seeing interest on the part of both,” he said, “although interest in document-based platforms like ours tends to be more in the first world – developing world countries are looking for systems developed on mobile platforms.”