UK mail industry meets in London to discuss latest trends

The UK mail and express delivery chain convenes in London tomorrow as the annual Mail & Express Delivery Show returns. This year’s event is taking place at the QEII Conference Centre, where everyone from shippers and courier firms to industry suppliers and high volume mailers will discuss hot topics in the sector.

Among the speakers at the conference will be TNT Express UK & Ireland managing director Alistair Cochrane discussing the changing face of the express market.

Nick Wells, the CEO of PostNL’s subsidiary TNT Post UK will be discussing new opportunities for mail operators just a few weeks after his company began a trial of end-to-end mail delivery, seeking to break the near-monopoly that Royal Mail has on the last mile in the UK.

Royal Mail’s director of consumer and network access, Stephen Agar, will look at the continuing role of physical mail in an increasingly digital age.

With the UK just a few months into a new regulatory regime under the watchful eye of communications industry regulator Ofcom, the agency’s competition policy director Chris Rowsell will be on hand to explain his organisation’s new light touch approach to price controls.

Parcels

And, among parcel delivery specialists addressing this year’s Mail & Express Delivery Show will be two companies in the process of deploying differing networks that both seek to expand consumer access to parcel collection and delivery – Hermes and Nightline.

Hermes head of strategy Rob Kay will be speaking in the same week his company formally launched its new myHermes ParcelShop network, offering a new parcel delivery channel via local convenience stores around the UK.

Irish firm Nightline will feature its CEO, John Tuohy, discussing innovation in the sector in the month that his company launches a new network of “Parcel Motels” in the Republic of Ireland, using automated self-service parcel terminals to expand consumer access to parcel deliveries in the 24/7 world of ecommerce.

The Mail & Express Delivery Show 2012 is supported by sponsors including Secured Mail, Hermes and Palletways.

• See also: Mail & Express Delivery Show speaker Stephen Ferguson, of GFS, discusses cross-border parcel delivery in Europe in yesterday’s in-depth article, Border Bother: How the EU should grow its e-commerce trade »