Romanian Post mulls digital trust services

The Romanian Post National Company is considering providing digital trust services as part of its growth plans.

The trust services could involve establishing a certificate authority.

Romanian Post officials, however, cautioned that plans for launching trust services were still at an early stage. In fact, the post has yet to write a business plan to implement the project.

“These projects involve a lot of money….We hope to find a way to resolve this,” said the chief of its Computer Network Office, Stefan Vlasceanu.

The post hopes to start work on the business plan in June and complete it in 30 days.

Vlasceanu didn’t set a date but said that the post wants to complete the digital trust services project as soon as possible.

When launched, it will let users employ digital signatures as a means of authentication. Digital signatures are hardly a widespread phenomenon in Romania. Vlasceanu argues that people are beginning to have greater trust in them. In addition, the signatures can also be put on a smart card.

Romanian Post’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, digital trust services have not been a compelling business proposition, at least for some of the posts that have launched initiatives centered on them. The Singapore Post, for instance, recently pulled the plug on its digital certificate venture following its commercial failure while the Malaysia Post’s DigiCert joint venture continues to limp along.

However, several other posts including An Post of Ireland, the Hongkong Post, Consignia of Britain, the Australia Post and Swedish postal operator Posten see a growth opportunity in digital trust services and have launched various initiatives to leverage them.

Like many other postal operators, the Romanian Post has also embarked on a strategy of embracing the Internet and extending its portfolio of services to the online world. In February, it launched an E-Post service.

A fee-based offering targeted at both consumers and businesses, E-Post is a type of hybrid mail service that lets subscribers zap e-mail either from their PC or from a kiosk at a post office to recipients who do not have a PC or Internet connectivity. The post prints out the e-mail at a location closest to the recipient and delivers it in hard copy format. Recipients can also go to the post office to access e-mail.

Romanian Post officials were uncertain about the market response to the E-Post service, which costs about 15 cents to send a single message.

E-Post is, however, not available in all post offices. Romanian Post officials said E-Post was currently available at 600 post offices.