 come up, he will be acting as our master of ceremonies this morning. Jean-Paul? Bonjour à toutes et à tous. Good morning everyone. You won't be surprised to hear that we're going to be speaking French a bit this morning as well as English. That's the charm of our wonderful organisation. Director-General, Deputy Jectory General, President of the CA, International Directors, members. I'm very happy to be greeting you this morning to open the first postal innovation forum organised here at the Universal Postal Union. It's a forum that I wanted to set up as part of the POC because the topic of innovation is fundamental. Perhaps some of you will recall that two years ago during the pandemic we organised an online forum entitled A Meeting with the Future Looking at Innovation. That session is still online and you can find it if you want to. I think that there are some statements including from people who are in this room which are still of great interest. Constantly seeking to improve what we currently have is what innovation is. Postal services have to innovate to adapt to technological advance, to behavioural change as well as other transformations and we also have to be part of this change. The UPU has already mobilised to develop digital services. Creating the dot post group is a key example of this and we're currently celebrating its 10th anniversary. The postal technology centre itself is increasingly seeking innovation and to make use of new digital technologies. There are many different areas. Artificial intelligence, high-speed data processing all allow for swifter software. The cloud and blockchain as well are also paths to explore. Innovation is one of the priorities of the ABAJON strategy and a committee of the POC has been given a mandate to look at this topic. As you heard yesterday it will allow for experiences to be shared as well as be imitated within the postal sector as well as for the development of new projects but we must do more. We must join together our efforts so that we can continue to improve quality of service for our customers and our citizens and respond to their expectations. This form which will now be held annually throughout this cycle will allow us to be even more mobilised. We will be looking to take advantage of your presence here at this first forum and please do make any suggestions for our upcoming forum. This is a major event in dealing with innovation, accelerating the accelerating competitiveness that we're seeing as well as the needs of our societies which are all an important backdrop. I wish you a successful forum and with that delay we have invited Dr Robert Giesendana Tobin who is from the EPFL from Lausanne to provide us with some food for thought to start the day off and to look at the need to innovate not just in the postal sector but a bit in a broader perspective. We are so grateful that he has come to join us this morning. Yes thank you very much also for my side. It's a honour to be here today to talk about innovation. It's also a honour to be the keynote speaker today to open this forum of innovation which is referred of a long series as I heard and I had the mission to inspire you maybe to give the impulse for today. I prepared a presentation, I have some slides but I know it's coming so maybe some words on my personal mind. I am an alumnus from the EPFL. The EPFL is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in a French speaking part of Switzerland. I did a PhD in aerospace. I worked 15 years in a big corporate and I'm back at the university since four years now at the interface between industry and academia but our role is really to transfer what's happening in the university and research side to have an impact on society. So I think I can share today some elements which are facing how can we best transfer the knowledge we have in our deep tech universities around the world also in Switzerland to society to have a positive impact for a better future. And I'm waiting for the slide. Great thank you. Thank you very much. I thought pictures brings more than a lot of words so I would start with some slides to follow the presentation today. So maybe you can just switch to the next slide please. Yeah so if you look at more generally I have an interesting survey of McKinsey 2020 looking at innovation and the innovation is a critical topic for all industry around the world. And if you look all the CU believe in the survey that innovation is critical for the future. I would say at that time 2020 is this COVID crisis. If you look what's happening now with the energy crisis with the war with the climate which is getting more emergent in the signal we see from around the world that we have to act I think innovation is keen and in every mouth. If you look at the other numbers yeah that you see that's not that easy. We can talk about innovation we know that innovation is key but the CEO says okay they have the expertise and the resources in-house to solve the problem only 21% but then if it comes to the performance is around 6% which is very low. So what what is the challenge? So I think it is mainly the execution of innovation. We can have a vision and if you go to the next slide please. And if you think about about the vision I had an interesting talk this morning and I heard okay yeah it's important to have this vision you know this far where do we want to go okay. You can have great ideas at the beginning and the the trouble in between can be at easy like this. You can even start making an e-bike at beginning to be in for to be faster at the goal but if you look at the reality and if you go to the second slide you look at the reality looks much more different. This is real life this is what happening so you start and you start maybe alone at the beginning and then you realize oh oh there's a challenge on the road okay. And the thing is you can only draw this map when you arrive at the goal so you don't know whether what you are facing on the travel. So the only way to move forward when talking about innovation you need collaboration. At the beginning you need collaboration you support in terms of the company maybe around your friends family when we talk about small companies. If you're a big corporate you need sponsors inside the company of course you need money and then you move forward. Time comes and you will need external partner. You need collaboration with external partner to support you why don't have the expertise to move forward. And important looking at this is you need this quick wins. You need this quick wins in the middle okay because it's long lasting. It will take a long time to move from A to B from the start to the end. So you need this in between and also important is about the structure of your company. Depending on how your structure, the culture you have in the company, the way you're working, the size, you will facing different challenges. Some structure will help you to move faster. Some other structure will harm you and it will take longer. So it's really about not about technology only it's about the culture of the company, the structure, the way you are built, the governance you have in the company, the partners you can find and it's all about you know you don't know what you don't know. So you have to find out what are the missing asking the right question and this takes time. And now talking about innovation we talk about ideas. Where do these in the ideas come from? Maybe the next slide please. And I thought maybe this is a great picture. It's about 2006. Maybe you know about this. It was about the Children's Hospital in the UK. They have a facing challenging at the handoff between the surgery and intensive care. And there were some really critical issues and these handoffs. And the way they solved the problem they look at what's happening on a formula one. They looked at how the team Ferrari worked and how did they manage the handoff the how they're working and looking what's happening on topics which are absolutely not linked to each other. They were able to increase to be better in the handoffs and decrease by more than 40% the critical issues during handoff. So the message is here when we're doing innovation, it's about an innovation new ideas appear at the interface between domains. And these domains can be brought as hobbies, tradition, biology, painting, blockchain. So you can mix all the domains and at the interface of these domains appears the new ideas. Maybe the next slide. So these are two domains. Now coming back a bit to a PFL, the Street Fair Institute of Technology in Lausanne. We are also two at the interface between two different worlds. On one side, we have academia. On the other side, we have the industry. And these are for history, extremely disconnected. I was working in a corporate for a long time. And to be honest, it was quite challenging work with us academia, because of the timeline and you know, it's not solving my problem directly. So yeah, we are facing this challenge. You see on the one side, we have the research in academia, they focus on invention and publication, doing great research, great discovery on the other side of industry where you know the pressure is there, you have to find solution. So what how can we link both worlds to make to make it happen? And exactly the same way, when comparing to Formula One and surgery, we're exactly the same in the same tension. So here what we can do is of course, talk about research collaboration, what we put in place over time is account management, someone which takes care of the company understand what are the problem and links it to the academia, and also supporting researchers to get the knowledge what's happening in industry to understand how to move where to put the research where put the energy on. And of course, one way of transferring the knowledge to the society is the creation of startups. We can also talk about it. And also an important not forget on academia side is the talents and the continuous education. It was a topic this morning. University is also there for not only for educating our PhD masters when you're just ready for the for the for the industry or for the for the for the for the career. But afterwards in the companies to upscale the people you have on board over time with the new knowledge to be sure they're able to take off what's happening in the academia to be ready for the future and implement what's happening outside. Next slide, please. So now going a bit deeper in the PFL, what are we talking about? So on one side, we have the PFL, we're talking about 20 or 50 labs, a lab is a professor, it's a structure. Often we call it a small SME because there's a lot of independence. It can be quite big like 40 people on board focus on one specific topic. We're covering different topics from life science, computer science, engineering, architecture, basic science, civil engineering, etc. If you look at the amount of people we have on the academia side, we are close to 70,000 people. On the other side, we have the chance to have the innovation park, which is linked to the to the campus. And on this campus on this PFL innovation park, we have the chance to have 150 startups grow over time. But today we have 150 startups, we are around about 330 corporates which are on the campus. So if you're somewhere close to 2600 people on the on the on the campus and in the innovation park. So if you sum it up, we're close to 20,000 people with 120 nationalities. It's great. It's diversity at large of all the technology. How can I source it? How can I take it to solve my problem? And that's what we are doing. We are this interface and you look over time, more than 400 startup went through the PFL and truly PFL innovation park. Thank you. If you look at the investment, which is a good indicator what's happening, if there's interest for the venture caps is that technology makes sense. We are close to 4.5 billion which were invested in our startup and research. 50 companies went through. And of course, the PFL is not alone. You need ecosystem which is around all the universities, the institution which is around the people, the city, everything makes sense. If you put the PFL in the desert, it will have not the same impact for sure. Thank you. And to push it further, okay. We thought about how can we support and that's that's how can we allow companies to connect with academia. So it's all about make them understand it's about education, understanding how can I connect to the ecosystem. So when we are collaborating with other companies with partners is really get to understand what are the needs of the others. Can we support it or can we find a win-win collaboration between them among us to move forward and together build the future. And what we put in place is we call it Kanova. It comes from Kilo Nova. Maybe you heard about it. It's the image of the fusion, the merger of two neutron stars and these two neutron stars academia and industry producing heavy metals like gold and platinum. Next slide, please. So but we're thinking further. This was the last 30 years. Some great results were happy. But it's not enough. Today or in the future, if you want to solve the big problems of society, there's not one lab one startup will solve the problem. We have to find a combination of those. So what we are looking at is the next generation of Innovation Park. We call it Ecotope, which is the minimum viable element where all different ecosystems are in it. And we talk about we want to enlarge the community. We're talking about community of community. Okay, we're talking about of course, the innovators, which are already on board, the PFL, which is already on board, my more strategic partner NGOs, part of it, politics, regulation, public authorities, citizens, okay, service providers, and you have to mix it to make it available that you can link these different parties together to make them understand what is that stack? What are the problem? What are the opportunities and support them in finding interaction and develop the future? So we are talking about co-dream, co-create and co-learn. Of course, we will make a failure when we have to learn on it and continue to dream to imagine the future. Next slide. And okay, community, you can make it digital today, but we think a surface is key. You need somewhere where people can meet. So we are imagining the future of the PFL innovation park. And we have the chance, you know, Switzerland is not that easy to find a surface to build something. But we have the chance next to the PFL, we have 240,000 square meters where we want to develop an innovation industry technology district. And on the surface, we want to build what we call our flagship building, the Ecotope, to think about the future, to bring people together, to think about the future, to make sense out of technology and solve the problem, not only talking about technology, talking about all the other elements, which is important regarding innovation, we talk about business model, we can talk about ethical aspects, political regulation, how these elements can play together to build the future. And with these words, I want to thank you. Maybe you have some question on that. And I hope I could give you the energy I have and where I get my energy to support you in the in the forum. The next today. Thank you so much, Professor. Are there any questions? While we have the professor with us, the first question is always the most difficult. If it comes Jose, of course, we want to ask you how Swiss post is benefiting from this ecosystem with the EPFL. So we Swiss port is a long partner since long time. They involve in what we call our Center for Digital Trust, where they look at the elements of cybersecurity, blockchain, the algorithms linked to that. And we're very happy because the Swiss post also started the program Canova, which I presented to you to explore and to better understand how can I connect to the academia to get most out of it. And it's really beyond technology in that front. It's really about the talents, the structures, maybe all the collaboration with other industry partners and start up we have in the campus. Any other questions? No. No regrets about that. OK, we thank you very much for your intervention. It was really very, very interesting. So now we're going to move on to the second part of our morning. And I would like to invite the Deputy Director General, who is going to be hosting this session, as well as the chair of the Council of Administration, and I will be joining them myself. The interpreters apologize, but we do not have any sound for the speaker. This was in the working. We will share. It's all about collaboration at the end. I was in a way thinking how to start and to address in a way my dear colleagues and friends and in a way welcome is you today. You know, it's it's a fireside chat. We don't have fire. We don't have red wine, but we will have, I hope, a nice chat and I hope we will be able to bring you some of the thoughts of my colleagues. Allow me to introduce them and they are in a way a good example. How small is world, actually? When I was young, Jean-Paul was as a student in my country that was in the late seventies. We never met at that time, of course. When Isaac was a young student, Jean-Paul was his professor. So what is really small? Please give him a round of applause for those two panels. In the world, we are delivering 85 million packages and documents per day. And digital transformation is apparently valid. 1.5 trillion US dollars. So this humble panel will try to in a way give you some thoughts about the innovation. Within UPU, we decided, together with Director General Metoki-san, part of executive management, that we will endorse innovation. And again, innovation is all about cooperation and collaboration. And this is the way how we will proceed. We will try to offer innovative and affordable solutions for all of you. So with this introduction, allow me also to explain innovation we started today. We have here a laptop, which indicates three minutes, meaning that when I will try to ask questions, the panelists have three minutes time to be concise and to provide you with their answer. And this is maybe something that we will try to introduce also in the future. This is innovation we were able to see during the ICAO Congress in Montreal in Canada. And at the end, if I may add something, last week I was in Frankfurt, opening the Parcel Post Expo. Now they have changed the name. And there was a lady, Kate Muth. She is a new or old CC member. And she asked me, Mr. Oswald, why or is it possible that UPU can be as fast as the private sector when it comes to innovation? And you know, my answer was, if I'm honest, I can only say, no, we cannot be as fast as private sector. But I can promise you that we will do our best to be faster. Thank you. So good morning, gentlemen, again. You had a nice breakfast this morning? We indeed, we did. Thank you. Would you like to say something at the beginning? Or just can I start with questions? How do you see it? Already spoken this morning. So in fact, I'll let the chair of the Council of Administrations speak. Well, in order to be more innovative, I think what I'll do first of all is just to say good morning to everyone, and then allow us to just take questions and innovate that way. I have in a way prepared three questions. And let's start with the first one. Jean Paul, if I may start with you being the younger member of this panel, innovation within the UPU family, can you endorse it? Jean Paul, you are in a way a lifelong member of post-Europe where we had a very nice collaboration in the last 15 years, if I may say so. And you were always endorsing innovation when it comes to European designated operators environment. How do you see this in the UPU environment? Thank you for that question. And given that you've referred to post-Europe, the funny thing is, right now, post-Europe is organizing its own innovation forum. So I think that's quite an interesting coincidence. There's room here at UPU for innovation. And in fact, nobody waited for us to start innovating. With other posts, with other postal technology centers, we've already begun innovating. The creation within Committee 3 of a working group on innovation is something that goes in line with that and broadens it. This is just the outset. We can see this as us setting off on a path. And I when I see the chair of the consultative committee with us in the room this morning, I think of when we were thinking about the consultative committee, and I thought, perhaps, we're going to need to find a way to attract here startups to get them into the ecosystem, ones that are already in the postal ecosystem, and to get them to push us, to drive us, to give us new ideas. Postal services themselves, and I think we'll come back to this, shouldn't try to invent everything themselves. And the professor just said that to us, they have to look around and see what's being done elsewhere. See what's taking place in society, in the economy. Look around and see what can be done to help the postal services be more efficient. We are old houses. The French postal system is 470 years old. Our agents have that mindset, perhaps. Now, perhaps that's not the same in all countries, but all the same, we need to stimulate our postal services. We have to get a revolution to be underway. We as the UPU, but also postal businesses need to be looking forward to innovation, something that we can start here, a place where we can see ideas coming from across the world, going across the world in order to enable innovation. Thank you. Your views on innovation within the UPU family, being a CHR and also Director General of Cote d'Ivoire Post. Thank you. I think for those who've been here for a long time within the postal sector, we can be proud of the many things that have already been done. And we've seen confirmation this morning that the global postal world has innovated and has made progress. If you look at the UPU family, I think that undoubtedly, and Jean-Paul already mentioned this, it is time for us to take a step further towards innovation. We have a good culture of innovation already here in UPU. What we perhaps need to do now is go beyond classic innovation and be more open, go towards open innovation. That might be the brick that's lacking in the edifice that we're building. That would enable us, each and every one of us, to have this dynamic come into play. Something that we're all looking for, where we're opening UPU to wider postal sector members. But in fact, industry, the postal industry is something that is made up of a family, an important family that can build an ecosystem. We need to have that rich soil in order to get the ecosystem going. And it needs to be something that is worldwide. If we don't open ourselves to open innovation, if we don't look at research institutes, if we don't go to the universities, academia, the private sector, already a lot of that is in place. Now that it's in place, we need to take the next step. Go toward open innovation. And as the professor was saying, I was very pleased to hear him say, we just need to get to the next step now. That's what our family, our UPU family should do. We have postal operators who perhaps are at the same distance from one another, but they too can turn themselves towards open innovation and enrich each other. If we have a platform, well, I don't think that I'm the only entity capable of setting up an ecosystem. But I think that in our postal system, we have private sector looking at us in research institutes looking at us, governments looking at us. I think this is our time. And I think we're ready. Merci, Isaac. In a way, now it's, I think, time also to share my experience five or six years ago in my previous organization. We were trying to sell a building, meaning we were decreasing the number of units and we were not able to sell it. And then at the end, somebody came up with an idea. Let's invite startups who are in a way close to logistics environment and give them some kind of, let's say, small rent just to cover the cost and try to, in a way, take advantage of this cooperation. So it was, in a way, a really nice experience we had at that time. Just an idea for everybody. Isaac, second question, role of governments in innovation. Innovation is not only about technology. Innovation, in a way, is dealing with all segments of our life. I had a nice chat during the presentation with Jean-Paul when I said, oh, this is in a way frightening if surgeons in hospitals are taking good examples from Formula One. But role of governments in innovation, Isaac, please. No, no. We ourselves should change our software. Governments don't have any difficulties with innovation, with the idea of innovation. That nourishes them. Now, perhaps we can feed into what they want to do, experts, etc. Each time we've organized a debate inviting governments to come and validate resolutions, for example, we haven't made any progress. So perhaps what we need to do is change the model, the way we work with governments, and tell them we are the ones who can be that development pillar, economic and social development pillar for them. And that is something that hits the heart of what they're looking for. When we show them that the postal industry is something that governments are lucky to have, that can help them with their financial inclusion, digital inclusion, energy inclusion. Governments will say to us, what is the solution? Because we can accompany you if you have it. They want to know what the contribution is that we can make. How can we improve the lives of populations? What drives them is the political discourse. We're in power. We're here to accompany you. We can make your lives better. So it depends on us first. And governments are waiting to see what we can give them, what that magic formula is going to be. We talk about the climate. We talk about financial inclusion. We talk about poverty in certain areas of our continents or of the world. We try to improve the supply chain, improve distribution, serve our citizens. But who has the tool to provide those solutions? It is the postal sector. The postal sector has to go to governments and have the governments validate the steps that we're taking. But if we have to invite governments to come and be part of it, to have resolutions, to talk about the budget, to decide whether or not this point or that point goes in line with what they want, I think I should say that I'm young enough now but once I'm older people are going to say, look you haven't changed anything in the matrix that you've got. They're waiting to see what we're going to bring that's new so that we can in the end be the game changer. I think the people who are in government have that culture as well. Isak, Jean-Paul, French La Post plays an important role in French society I know and many years ago I don't know if that's still a practice today. I've heard that state is subsidizing delivery of newspapers because there is an interest that people are reading nowadays with social networks and things have changed dramatically unfortunately in the negative way. But anyway, you being a national operator in France, what kind of role government can play or should play to foster innovation? Thank you. That is an excellent question Marjan. Let me begin by saying that when President Macron was elected he wanted to change France into a startup nation and in fact sometimes it wasn't something that people welcomed but he was in that frame of mind. Now after that you can see there's the motivation but then you have to try and turn that into action. He tried to continue on with efforts that had been made by his predecessors, encouraged startups, to try and facilitate things for them with tax incentives, to try and enable a fabric to be woven in all sectors was part of what he wanted to do and what struck me was that you have ministers, you have the cabinet and there are young people in those cabinets. I was in one of those ministerial cabinets years and years ago so I know what things are like behind those closed doors and la Poste can't see that or they don't see it anymore or they didn't see it anymore until the COVID pandemic. So what was at stake for us was that we had to demonstrate first of all that La Poste had changed and I can tell you now that between our sorting centers that we had when I started 40 years ago and the ones we have with robots everywhere now there has been innovation. We haven't been lagging behind in innovation but we're just not very well known. Everyone thinks they know what La Poste is all about because you can go to the post office and mail the letter or whatever but somehow we have to make it visible to other people how La Poste has been a factor of innovation in the country. I'm not complaining about the government with the relationship we have with the government they are encouraging us to innovate. What I'm thinking is that in many countries sometimes governments aren't providing their postal services with the support they need in order to innovate. That might be one of the messages through benchmarking through the exchange of lessons learned and best practices. Maybe that's where we could help because I think that the POC is where we can really have a good discussion about innovation but also and Isaac was referring to this in the Council of Administration we could remind our government representatives that the postal services need their support. Merci Jean-Paul would you both agree with me that in a way Covid gave additional chance in parallel to e-commerce to the post to define the role of the National Postal Operating Society again would you agree with me with this sentence? May we have a microphone please for the chair of the CA? Yes I think that the pandemic did confirm that but the Covid pandemic just brought those who were the most skeptical to the table and they were reminded how important it was. Do you know I wasn't here 30 or 25 years ago but the postal carrier 25 years ago or the representative of the post office was the second or third most important person in a village or a town. You couldn't do anything without the postmaster you had of course somebody who was in town hall you had your under prefect but and the postal agent was very important they were an essential link in a chain of services to citizens it was a social link between the government and its population and now with the evolution of technology things perhaps have become a little more sophisticated but e-commerce isn't something new we used to have cash on delivery that was the beginning of e-commerce we had money transfers that already existed in a certain format so we did have things we do have email now that has been based on the concept of having a post office box so we're bringing the information back to the deciders we are an essential link in the chain of the economic and social development of our countries for our populations and also an actor to generate wealth we have to demonstrate what we assert and we have to show that postal operators can help so covid did perhaps trigger some movement but i should say that the postal services around the world were already key i would be in favor perhaps during the ca to communicate in a different way with our governments perhaps we should try and think of what would be the best way of putting this to them some postal operators have already demonstrated what those pieces of the puzzle are and how we can bring our services to our populations so i'm not going to say oh it's a good thing we had the covid pandemic certainly not but it is something that brought a number of elements to light and that we can use to work from we boom yes i might see this under a different angle but complimentary to what's just been said i think i agree that the covid pandemic was important and did bring innovation there's no doubt about that at least from the supply side of post offices who being very close to populations were called upon to add to the offer that they had sometimes in in very short periods of time that were just covering the pandemic or the lockdown periods etc i'm thinking of delivering groceries to people in rural and isolated areas i'm thinking of having medication brought to people i think that that put the postal services in a new light as useful services close to populations that were specifically useful in periods of crisis now that expanded e-commerce that how can i put this in order for us to be able to ensure we were able to successfully meet the demand in e-commerce we had to innovate i think that the markets as they were shaping up before the pandemic pushed us forward and that was when we started to have platforms we could see that we had to improve our delivery service our time frames the quality of service we have to acknowledge that that we had to improve in these areas and we know that there are other subjects tied to platforms that we could get into but i think that that was what had shaken us up a little bit before pre-pandemic and what i'd also like to add just to come back briefly to the question of what upu can do i would like to remind you all as the chair of the poc that the poc was in fact created in order to ensure that the postal services in the most developed countries enable the entire postal community to benefit from their knowledge from what they had learned that has been done it continues to be done and it's something that we have to come back to for some time we'd sort of lost sight we'd put our energy elsewhere when we were looking at uh terminal dues and inward land rates looking at the types of products that we might innovate on expand the products that we that we had invented but we now need to come back to the reason why the poc was created those enlightening words another one in a way also last question from my side would be we were closed for two years living through zooms ms teams and tools like that and we were in a way fed up and i see here around now full hall again after so many years there is a david only wearing a mask now two persons are wearing a mask so it's again nice to see that but would you say would you share the view of mine in a way that these tools at that time were available even much longer ago but now they are making our life much more efficient and when they emerge during the covid environment we were like fed up but now because of teams and zooms we are more efficient would you will you share with me this thank you i agree my own personal view and that may be because i spent more of my career in telecommunications and in the postal services because in fact it's the same family i can see that in fact postal carriers and postal agents are very conservative and they have always been so that's why we have to trigger innovation innovation isn't only about technology innovation is about doing things in a new way or finding new methods in order to get different results perhaps one of the first things we need to innovate on is to be less conservative in our attitudes because things already existed that other people were using but we had to be pushed into that and that's what made us accelerate our means of communication our ways of working you might recall those who were in the beijing congress when cote du voire had been organized in order it had been chosen to organize congress we never imagined we were going to be able to vote with buttons and clicks and things so the technology already existed but we have to make sure that we ride that wave and stop being so well it's not a bad way of working and it certainly wasn't a bad way of working in the past but the world has changed and we have great many new constraints and perhaps we have to be a little less conservative in the way we think and act that's where the the postal world needs to innovate i learned that here we need to have further studies we need to have deeper analysis we have to add to what we already know in our upu family where we want to move toward change and innovation if all we're doing is asking for meetings so that we can have more information and further study well sooner or later you're going to have to do something with the results of those studies you have to validate them you have to implement the decisions that are called upon while other people have already done that so the innovation we really need to work on is to stop being so conservative my favorite word for the study well given that isaac was took time to answer i'm going to be very brief i think you have to do both and you have to try and take the best of both worlds i think that the physical presence we have is irreplaceable in some ways we do need to meet because we do have rich exchange when we can meet face to face something you can't do at home the difficulty we have in upu added to that is that we are here it's 10 o'clock in the morning but what time is it in australia what time is it in the united states and suddenly you realize that for people to be able to work together there aren't that many time frames where you can all be up and working at the same time so we do have to change the way we work but we have to perhaps use both ways of working together video didn't kill the radio star and so i think that in fact the two can coexist so thank you thank you for the panel thank you for the questions we will continue now with our program understood yeah what was a real pleasure for me and allow me just to remind you that we also introduced after many years we want to know from you how we do you feel about the setup how do you feel about the presentation so just scan the QR code and your opinion matters thank you very much thank you Jean-Paul and thank you Isaac so i would like to ask the participants in our next panel to come up to the podium now we have alexander ahang from post in norheim ah no i'm sorry i was looking at panel two by accident we have mr mozza is he here yes he's online yeah we have very good i can see kathrine crimson i know that mrs jeffar is online mr jario louis maro ronda lascaro is here and siva so i'll give the floor to siva now i just want to before we start i just want to confirm uh both brian and um as around can you see us clearly on the podium again great thank you brian you're good yes i'm excellent and siva thank you very much thank you very much everyone all right um good morning everyone and it's really very good to see all of you here in this first edition of what's been referred to as the postal innovation forum my name is siva somersundrum for those of you i haven't had the pleasure to meet before i'm the director for policy regulation and markets and in that capacity i have some responsibilities in relation to knowledge strategy and and innovation um just before we begin and before i i introduce the panelists i just wanted to give um some context as to why um we're having this particular panel um firstly i think some of you may be wondering in fact a colleague of mine did ask the question so in a postal innovation forum held under the auspices of the poc why are we having a panel on regulatory innovation and regulatory innovation uh in respect to the postal sector there's a very simple answer to that and and and i think that came out in the presentations made by robert as well as in the discussions in the fireside chat i think we should all be thinking of innovation as a cross cutting and horizontal issue it it needs to permeate everything that we do in the upu from the development of standards uh postal operations and also treaties and so in in in many respects we're going to have to talk about innovation uh in a regulatory context as well um and this means that we've got to foster and create dialogue between all our stakeholders and and what better place to do it both in the poc and the ca and in fact uh as the poc chair and and and marion had indicated the idea is to have this forum as a regular event uh under the auspices of either the poc or the ca with themes that will be addressed and looked at by all stakeholders now the second context for this particular panel is the fact that um there is some debate around whether regulation in the postal sector uh is fit for purpose at the conference on postal regulation that was held in s1 we did have some feedback from governments themselves as well as designated operators and wider postal sector players that maybe postal regulation is is sort of behind the curve i think we all recognize that postal regulation needs to be in the game but there's a question about whether it should be ahead of the game and and that's part of the discussions we're going to have today because there are many challenges for governments and there are many challenges for regulators from sustainability uh from digitization how do we promote collaboration and partnerships which is another theme that was picked up by robert in his in his opening remarks because it is absolutely true that innovation is fostered when you have ecosystems when you have the ability to cross domains and and and draw on ideas and so that is one of the reasons why we're having this particular panel on regulation the context of a broader debate on on innovation so with those very short opening remarks i want to introduce my panelists for today we're very fortunate to have some very good people who have given us their time first and foremost let me start with the colleagues who are online we have miss izan azira moema jaffa who's the head of korea departmental postal korean and e-commerce division within the militian communication and multimedia commission which is the regulator in malaysia so welcome izan and it's really good to see you hi thank you good to be here thank you and then we have brian uh muwanza who many of us know he's a he's a very well known name in in postal regulation he is the head of postal that the head of the postal section within the southern african communications regulators association brian has tremendous insights on on regulatory approaches in the african region and we're really looking forward to hearing his views and then i have with us two colleagues as well well-known colleagues in postal circles we have kathryn grimsey who's principal analyst at kallen international who was previously with the norwegian regulator and then we have mr marilanda i hope i've got that right hero and he's the deputy director of postal affairs from the columbian ministry of technology and communication so thank you all for joining us and with that i'm going to start with some questions because i don't think we have a lot of times of early interventions but we'll we'll get straight into questions if that's if that's okay with everyone all right um maybe let's start with kathryn because your clues is to be kathryn um kathryn as i said before um at the s1 conference on postal regulation there was some feedback around the fact that postal regulation wasn't keeping up with market developments and in some ways it was becoming increasingly outdated and that we're not evolving uh with new thinking new approaches and market developments one of the things that we talked about in the context of the fireside chat as well as the remarks by robert was that partnerships data-driven policy making and core regulation is increasingly characteristic of many other industries and it's becoming so also in the case of the postal sector now in your view um what's your take on this and are we actually facing a crisis in regulating the postal sector thank you kathryn well thank you first of all siva for inviting me to speak at this very first innovation forum it's uh it's always a pressure to be back and to to meet and read all my former colleagues it's um regarding your question uh i think crisis might be a very strong word uh we are in a period of significant change uh and this change is accelerated by uh two key factors the digitalization and the global appeals we see uh in the world uh digitalization has changed um the the face market or facing the postal market in many countries uh which now are increasingly moving away from letters and more to packets and parcels due to the increasing e-commerce volumes uh the global appeals like the covid crisis and now the war in ukraine uh it creates a massive stress on the postland transportation networks uh and this the rapid change um and reactions from the industry which so far has been uh right the stable i would say and uh though we have to do maybe faster changes uh so what can what can we do on the regulatory side is the regulatory approach a problem or a part of the solution in this context as a social scientist when i'm faced with the difficult questions like this i always try to say it's like it depends uh and in this case i don't think it depend on the nature of the market the regulatory approach issues and then the natural inheritance of regulation itself uh first um to elaborate more it depends on the nature of the market at cologne we follow postal regulation across multiple markets and what we observe is that uh the post and markets are very different in nature uh from country to country and from regions to regions uh some are very competitive uh with multiple strong players and uh some are not with just one main player in the market uh while letter volumes are falling in most countries this is not the case everywhere so you have to tailor the regulation to fit the market you cannot just copy paste the regulation from one country to another or from one region to another um and it also depends on the regulatory approach of the philosophy of the regulation in this particular country in some countries often where those opposing markets are rather closed with one operator and the regulator is working very closely with this operator they can relatively easily make changes to the regulation in other markets where the regulator is challenged by the operator changes can be much worse to to um to do and this is also a slower way of of doing changes in the regulations uh some regulators always try to be very detailed uh and specific in the regulations uh others not so much depending on the on the philosophy in the country uh and we study markets where the regulators has imposed 24 quality service targets uh this is a lot and other markets we don't see that's much um uh search targets uh what we also see is that the softer approach may work uh in the market uh by this i mean it's um situations where the regulator can um avoid imposing rules but leave to the market to um uh to kind of self-regulate uh to facilitate the industry so they um solve its own problems in a way this can take many forms uh and of course it's not suitable for every situation uh but we see markets where the regulator set principles uh like complaint had marketing um complaint handling procedures that's in europe uh right now and sometimes with um guidelines in addition to to give more details uh but still it's not a regulation uh and then the regulator only intervene uh in detail when there are specific cases uh that's brought on the table uh we also see markets where the regulators work with the market players to encourage operators to develop the industry self-regulation not to impose hard rules but to self-regulate um this is seen in europe uh like on publication on information on quality service or compensation on the delivery delay and i also think that the natural inertia of the regulation it's uh it's critical um we have to accept and it's maybe right that it should be like that uh that regulation and laws change slowly just like uh the dgg just mentioned they can never be as fast moving as the market itself and giving that this is the case uh one way uh is to regulate based on principles uh and have fewer hard written laws so again it's uh it's not the one answer that fits every situation on this we uh i think we it's nearly always a good idea to to for the regulations to be dependent on market evidence it should be open and flexible the regulation must listen to the market uh and based on principle to allow for change and then again it should be consistent and predictable to avoid stiffening the market in a situation like this face today so thank you thank you very much kathryn some very important points there and i'm going to go off script now because i think what i want to promote in this session is a dialogue so i'm going to ask kathryn a follow-up question because i think she's made a couple of points there that are quite critical about thinking uh uh about innovation in the context of regulation so you you you refer to the fact that increasingly governments and regulators in in some parts of the world for sure are looking at principle-based approach to regulation or cooperative approaches to regulation where there is a constant dialogue and a feedback loop between regulators and and stakeholders in the in the sector with a view to developing appropriate regulatory frameworks does that in some ways also provide the solution to be sort of market responsive so in in some ways i'm challenging you on the point about whether regulation does always have to be slow can it not through these sort of innovative approaches to regulation be also be responsive and in some ways be ahead of the game well thank you for that challenging question it's uh what we see especially in europe uh europe is my market that's where i do my regulatory surveillance and what we see is we have the european postal directive from 1997 it's 25 years old and there are some the rules very much detailed rules are hard written in this directive it's it's not anything we can easily ditch we have to to be aware of these rules and the details in the regulation but still the european regulators group they're more and more listening to the stakeholders in the market i know that shan paul and post europe is very uh on to to do the discussions with the regulators to see what can we do in the next um the next period it's we are about maybe to have a new discussion about the postal regulation in europe and how can we avoid the same situation to to do the hard um hard law and more like flexible rules to make sure that we cover all the different national needs in the in the regulatory framework okay thank thank you very much kathryn um what i will do now is move on to um izan and and and hero because i think it's worth getting a national context of what's happening both in malaysia um as well as in columbia so maybe i'll turn to izan first so izan um you quite recently uh introduced what uh is referred to in bahasa and i hope i pronounce this properly plan accelerator courier negara uh which is pa kej and and this is aimed at providing um a first-class quality of service to all malaysians in in relation to um e-commerce items particularly because over the last few years you've seen you know approximately 14 parcels per capita uh to 30 parcels per capita by 2025 which is the objective um what what underpin the approach that malaysia took to this um and and how did you actually go about designing a data-driven approach because we understand that there is a a fair amount of data analytics that that went into developing the the regulatory framework thank you sir thank you mr sumasundar morning and hello from sunny malaysia so when the global pandemic hit us back in 2020 it has obviously affected the people government industries and businesses here in malaysia and postal and courier industry companies are no exception with the population of 32 million people e-commerce and parcel delivery consumption had doubled from seven parcels per capita in 2019 to 14 parcels per capita in 2020 and we uh closed 2021 with 24 parcels per capita so the growth of e-commerce has shown that the digital economy will be a critical part of the world and malaysia going forward with a kegel of 24 in the next five to ten years however it was apparent to us that with the highly competitive market financial stability was a concern companies have seen revenue growth stagnant with increasing price pressure and delivery services continues to be a challenge as well as there is a need to improve quality of service through real time and accurate delivery updates there has been a significant growth in the industry and projections show that it will continue to grow in the foreseeable future however MCMC's role is and focus now is to ensure that postal and courier industry takes the necessary steps to deliver a first-class service to include access and coverage perspective as well so realising the challenges faced by the industry MCMC had organised a national postal and courier industry lab in 2020 during the lab industry participants worked closely with the nation government to formulate improvement initiatives from perspective of licensing quality access and coverage of postal and courier services as well as planning investments in high potential areas to enable more people to benefit from the availability of comprehensive and quality delivery services we had engaged the postal and courier service providers in addition to several relevant ministries and government agencies more than 20 stakeholders from the public and private sectors were interviewed to obtain feedback and on issues challenges and constraints related to the industry meanwhile the entire activity of the lab span across more than 100 stakeholders representing more than 30 organisations and companies from the public and private sectors so the findings from the final report helped formulate the strategic roadmap for the national postal and courier industry known as the national courier escalator plan package which is translated from the Malaysia that you correctly mentioned just now it is aimed at delivering improved and flexible access and coverage of postal and courier services to the consumers and merchant communities this is through integration of end-to-end delivery systems up to the last modernary points as well as improve courier services through the setting of industry benchmarks and guidelines of the quality service to ensure consumers and business communities will receive first-class service so the new approach formulated through lab syndication has provided us the necessary feedback for government to review the corresponding legislations related to the postal and courier industry to ensure a competitive industrial environment in line with rapid technological investment especially in digitalisation area era with that we also look into regulatory tech which is increasingly becoming integral part of regulator in promoting development and innovative or smart regulation for the sector at MCMC we drive the culture of data usage and running alongside it is to establish policies around data sharing data classification and overall data governance so the main pillar or the framework is to nurture technology capabilities deployment of data and analytics capabilities which includes the establishments of data analytics tools and platform data warehouses and self-serving dashboards these analytic platforms enable self-serving analytics such as demand for data querying analysis virtualization rises throughout the organization with the platform users are empowered with capabilities to discover connect to integrate and share the data as they need optimally so with MCMC having these capabilities and competencies it will lead us to having greater insights to key areas of the national postal and courier network such as network health bottlenecks and optimization with the continuing technology evolution towards greater adoption of software and all areas of businesses and operations data will obviously play a very a much bigger role to unlock more insights therefore MCMC will leverage on these capabilities and competencies to drive widespread and standardised sharing of the data points by industry and network players with this in this tech driven ecosystem towards shaping up up-to-date policies and regulations. Did you want to carry on? Yeah I just got one last line with the industry led initiatives and collaboration as well as regulatory tech implementation of package is vital to ensure Malaysia remains competitive in this global and Asian digital economy. Thank you. Thank you Izan and please call me Siva. Those are really interesting points that you make and I picked up on two which I want to sort of further explore a bit more. One is the idea of a lab where the ministry actually engaged with a hundred over stakeholders in a in a core regulatory exercise. How different is that compared to a normal public consultation process that a government or a regulator would typically undertake with stakeholders in developing its regulations. So what's the distinction between the lab and a public consultation exercise that aims to receive feedback from stakeholders? Sure so we believe with this new approach of lab syndication and it is a very interactive session we have with every stakeholders within the industry so this includes our licenses, other key stakeholders so industry players, government agencies, government ministries itself. So during these sessions we have direct input coming from them discussing challenges, discussing issues and how strategic ways and we can address all these challenges. So as compared to probably let's say public consultation for example it is a very structured survey and maybe some of these questionnaires or even feedback does not come through through a piece of paper for instance. So we believe that the lab that we conducted has proven very effective in ensuring that we deep dive into what are the challenges that were faced by industry and how we effectively solve them. No thank you Izan and just one final point that that's very useful. Data sharing and data analytics are quite critical as you correctly point out but one of the barriers around the use of data in the context in a regulatory context is the the confidentiality of that data particularly if it's coming from different players within the sector some of it's commercially sensitive in other instances they are absolutely critical in terms of trade secrets. How did the ministry actually deal with those issues? So as a regulator these data shared with us are obviously not re-open to public consumption for example. So we definitely act as a chemistry of data coming in and these data are filtered obviously before it's been released to the identified key holders for example industries. So the level of data that is being shared back obviously has been has to be go through with a high level of sensitivity and security. Okay thank you very much Izan and I I'll take you off the the limelight for now and I want to say to Hero I hope I'm pronouncing that right Hero it's perfect thank you thank you. Hero you're from the Colombian ministry you're a deputy director for postal affairs and quite importantly you've been part of a team that has developed a plan around the modernization of the regulatory framework that would apply to the postal sector in Colombia and this plan is meant to run from 2020 to 2024. I've heard a lot of good things about the plan and in particular around the use of technology in trying to implement some of the objectives. Sorry in terms of trying to reach some of those objectives so maybe could you just walk us through the sort of key facets of the plan and what the role of data is in all of this. Thank you. First of all thank you for this invitation to come and be in this panel. For Colombia it's really important to be able to share the work that we've been doing over the last four years and this enables us to explain a little bit. I'm going to switch to Spanish now rather than French. So for us being in a space like this in the UPU as a Colombian it's something that gives us a lot of pleasure and pride. Our postal systems have existed for 150 years and we want citizens in the world to have access to communications and we want to be able to have all of the elements of the people to be something that they can feel is something that enables them to progress. We during the pandemic we're pleased to be able to continue working for the people. Colombia has not been an exceptional case. We published recently our plan our public plan for the sector. We have activities that we plan to implement focused on legislation, legislation that goes back to 2009. Legislation has been updated and we wanted to make sure it was modern. Our regulatory framework has to provide to many different players a framework for decision-making that is rather complex and yet it's our belief that the information that each one of those players can bring is necessary. We need it in order to bring innovation and to modernize our systems. We're thinking of two main pillars we think of the users and the operators. The users they need to have quality services provided to them they need to have value added each time because otherwise we're not fulfilling the promises that we make and we have to think of our operators because they also need to know amongst themselves that they're providing the best service that they can. So when we published the plan what we wanted to do was to look at the lessons learned from other countries as well the United States for example what's France doing what's Poland doing what is Brazil doing we use them as a reference because we think in the sector they are a good example to follow. So we update our our basic regulations and the framework trying to think about what we can do focusing on technology but innovation as we've already heard isn't just about technology but it is necessary. So we're thinking about drones we're thinking about artificial intelligence we need to have all sorts of different innovations. We're thinking about the users again and in our operators. So what is it that we're trying to do with our new information system reporting to our operators? We want in a not very distant future in Colombia to have everyone available to have access to the information if you have a parcel or a postal item that's going between Medellin and Bogota we want the system to be able to tell you as the operator who is it that's providing this service what are the businesses that are using it when was the item delivered we want differentiated information so that people can see where's the closest place for them to get that item all of this is part of regulation and our operators have to tell us what type of information and what quality of information has to be available and a lot of countries are looking at this our ministry has a number of different functions but we also have a regulatory commission for communications and this enables us to protect our users and our designated operator and its role so when you look at the interest of this and the interest of this type of panel as well and you're trying to provide good service to your users you have to think about your operators and their regulatory framework because amongst our operators we have healthy competition we have their presence their part of the ministry's work and they're trying to say i'm doing the best job here i'm doing the best job there you also have a relevant point and that is how close we can be to the different users of our system because when you're behind closed doors in your office sometimes you can lose from sight what's happening out in the country but if you have direct channels of communication with people including your operators then you get better and more information from them and so just to explain a very simple case that we have in Colombia for example we have an operator in Colombia who sat down to discuss with us what they might bring to citizens in a country like ours where we do wonder about getting to marketplaces sometimes there's still fear in Colombia and we have to innovate and we have to make sure that we can be that link between the operator and people between the business and the client or the customer and i have to be the piece of the puzzle the postal piece of the puzzle that can get that item to the person's house and so what we're doing is making sure we know what the expectations are making sure that the transaction can take place so this is partly what we're trying to do in our country trying to get better information because we're convinced that if you get better information then you can do away with the doubts that people have when they're making decisions and again that enables us to think about our operators on the one hand and the clients the users on the other hand naturally thank you very much hero and some very important points that you've picked up which are which were also reflected in in in the comments made by Catherine and is on i am very aware of the time limits that we've got so what i'd suggest is we we move next to brine and then i'll come back with some follow-up questions and open the floor for questions as well last but not least brine i think we've all heard some national perspectives here we've also had a perspective from Catherine in her role with Cullen where as she said she she has looked at a number of markets in Europe brine talk us about talk to us about some of the the more innovative approaches to regulation that that's taking place in southern Africa and some of the challenges and opportunities that exist in in that context we'd really love to hear about that thank you thank you very much similar i hope you can hear me clearly yes we can thanks bro excellent yes i have been listening with interest to the other speakers and the interpreters have to apologize i'm afraid the quality of sound might not enable us to interpret everything um brine do you have a headset with you uh yes i do um perhaps i can attempt to use it now yeah that might sort of cut out the the feedback loop hello Siva can you hear me um it's a bit better um interpreters can you i think we'll do our best sir thank you very much interpreters thank you brine please go ahead my apologies that's Siva to answer your question um what are some of the regulatory approaches that you know are taking place in in this part of the world and um you know how much is process a place in all this um as you know um the regional regulator association like process it's exactly a unique platform for pushing regulatory modernization at scale and why do i say this this is because when member countries come together um they have that opportunity to not only their resources but also their expertise um to consider and resolve common regulatory common regulatory challenges and issues of that nature so in terms of specific activities that um as we actually undertake there is no secret to it Siva research is one of them it when we talk about modernization we cannot avoid uh the pursuit of of knowledge um i remember your first question was uh dealing with how regulation is sometimes behind uh the developments in the market and when you consider regulation being both uh exposed and ex ante the ex ante side of it actually allows regulators to look ahead of the curve and create regulation that is facilitated of the direction that the market is is taking or at least the direction that you anticipate the market to take so the only way you can do that effectively is actually to do things like research so we have partnered with institutions academic institutions such as the Dix University to utilize their research capabilities as well so that we can you know gain those insights into the future sector monitoring as well it's also very important how we gather statistics from the operators that are licensed and how we analyze those statistics what story are they telling us of the evolution of the sector those are valuable insights that as well to inform regulation also institutional capacity building and by that i mean facilitating the regulators themselves not only with tools but with skills and knowledge as well um regulators that are well capacitated are actually better placed and better able to perform their functions more effectively of course we also incorporate project management methodologies project management you know approaches to the whole regulatory life cycle and what do i mean by that i mean you know when we develop when we continue we start from the process of research identifying the regulatory issue coming up with a solution determining which instrument who used to intervene that whole process is managed to sound project management methodology this gives you all the you know the required attributes that are desirable in project management such as the time boundness the the attention to objectives and results that you want to attain the the attention to risk management and and so on and so forth so that also has to be brought into you know how regulators do their work and that is one of the things that we are doing also Seba our primary output is regional regulatory instruments i guidelines if i can call it that and these guidelines really are our primary tool for accepting modernization in regulation and again these guidelines are developed by the regulators themselves using the research that i spoke about earlier and informed guidelines are more effective guidelines if i can put it like that and we are dealing with a multitude of topics um Seba things such as universal access and service interconnection and network access also decommission and trade facilitation those are guidelines that as possible we have produced and we regularly review these reflect the evolution in in the market and the sector um Seba if you allow me also to speak about um an important regulatory approach which again addresses the issue of regulation being behind the sector there look once you have in place a sound research base you research is your culture knowledge thinking is your culture you are actually in a position to signal the market not only to sit back you actually affect change in the market you actually signal the direction that operators take you know being tool such as regulatory discussion papers on on topics that they they may never have thought about before to signal the fact that as a regulator who's thinking about this you're thinking about this direction and it actually signals to operators that look this is a part of the market that we can actually move into we could actually exploit this idea that has been brought about from the regulatory space so Seba i hope i've given you um a synopsis of our approach and some of the things exciting things that we do i think thank you so much Brian very very interesting points and relevant points now before i sort of open the floor to q and a some of the take takeaways that i've had from this particular session are some some points that i would stress we might take up in the q and a as well what is the idea that innovation is not just about technology and i think harry you made this it's really important to understand at least in a in a regulatory context it's about looking at approaches to regulation as well as the use of technology to try and to facilitate it as well and then in terms of approaches we heard the very interesting concept of a of a lab that the emulation ministry um undertook to to try and get hold of views to engage in a more core cooperative approach to regulation or core regulation and that sort of leads to catherine's point that um those sorts of principles based approach core regulatory approaches might actually mean a much better way of regulating the market as opposed to um exonte fixed in stone approaches which aren't necessarily reactive so we've got quite a lot in all of the interventions that have been made so i thank you all but and i will now open the floor for questions i think raj is uh is wanting to take the floor raj please i would thank you thank you siva i was going to wait to see if anyone else had a question because i to take the floor a little too much in this place but anyway i'll i'll ask my question then so when it comes to innovating in the regulatory craft there's different styles that postal regulators will have some regulators have a very heavy touch but they think they have a light touch others have a very light touch but in fact they have no touch and finding the right touch of a regulator is often a very significant task on top of the work that a regulator has to find the right touch whether it's heavy whether it's light whether it's ex ante whether it's appropriate at all they have a wide range of stakeholders they have to work with including the designated operator any ministry or or country level interests that are at play and then of course the customer and and everybody else in this regulatory mess in this gumbo soup that the regulator has to deal with and given the absolute devastation that's happening in the postal industry right now how does the regulator find that right touch how do you find the the canary in the coal mine so to speak thank you rach i might turn that question to hero because i didn't give him a follow-up question after his presentation so here right that's a good question that's a really good question i wish we had an easy answer but as far as i'm concerned to reply it's and the task is more awareness raising in the postal sector and i'm speaking about my own case in columbia in the ministry where it's communications and information technologies we have to think about the spectrum we have to think about all the other different things that we have in satellites and etc but if you can manage to have your decision makers sit down explain to them how important it is and demonstrate that a country like mine is one where the postal sector has a large role to play with lots of people working for it people who are going into every area of the country then your operators and your regulator can see the importance my ministry has to be aware of how important it is you have to demonstrate to them where the importance of the postal sector lies and how it participates there are so many different types of regulation there are so many different bodies trying to get them all to agree is difficult so you have to try and use regulations that aren't laws uh or try and adapt though that's one thing but in the parliamentary debate and then when you have the laws that are drawn up i don't have all of the answers naturally but what you have to do is make sure that people are aware you have to be able to have the ear of your authorities and let them know what the postal sector is it's not just documents and letters it's something that can bring goods around the world and i think what you have to do is make sure that they know what it is we do tell them give them a story a film to think about and so that they can see what the capacity is of the postal sector sector is we have to be able to tell them that story thank you hero um i want to also ask that question of is on because unlike rata i don't see it as a mess i see it as an ecosystem where you're going to have competing tensions and interests and the real role of governments is to try and find a way to balance that out and get the best out of all of us so is that i was really struck by your lab concept so maybe could you talk us through how did you find the right touch through a lab please thanks Eva so the entire idea of the national postal and courier lab was to have all of the key stakeholders basically through structured sessions we go through areas or areas of concerns especially impacting the industry so under package we have identified in total gate initiatives on one of it is we're looking at licensing we looked into the implementation of base price for courier services we also look into the possibility of network sharing amongst key players so through this session consulted basically brought through by a consultant we looked into number one looking into the challenges and what are the resources available but where it being from the private sector or whether it's from government and look into how together we can come together looking into possible solutions in addressing those concerns so with that approach we believe that everyone came into the session with a clean slate coming in into everyone is an equal player have a say an opinion to be shared with the rest of the participants so from there we had obviously the entire session was documented it was a field that it was structured in a way to come and hence we formulate the help formulate a package which is a five-year plan for the postal and food industry in Asia okay thank you very much isam that's very helpful i just want to let participants who are joining us remotely that you can ask questions as well so just raise your hand on the on the raise your hand function through zoom and we'll pick you up i think we do have a question from someone yeah brian please go ahead thank you i was just actually hoping to contribute to the question that raj asked and from from my perspective regardless of how messed up um the situation that raj described is um from a regulatory perspective there are certain fundamental outcomes that i believe are desirable to all the stakeholders and once we consider these regulatory outcomes as the basis for regulatory intervention it is much much easier to bring together all the firing voices of firing stakeholders that have a role to play there are certain fundamentals like the the concept of universality the concept of consumer protection or quality of service or competition management security and integrity in the network at cross level we actually use these fundamentals as the basis for all the regulatory uh interventions that are developed at regional level and we have found that once there is agreement at this fundamental level it's much actually much easier to look on it regardless of the question that that comes on the table i just thought that would be something that that value to that response but thank you thank you very much brian it's it's so true because a shared understanding of the problems and and the objectives of any solutions are critical and that results in in greater consensus building um any other questions so i've got hands in the floor i'll take the gentleman from india pranoy please thank you siva uh i i i just uh referred to the panelists uh from norway uh about the self-regulation and it is i think a good growing concept and in some of the sectors in india is also like social media and all the self-regulation is being propagated so uh what do you feel about the principles which should be especially considering that the postal sector now also uh very closely linked with e-commerce there are different regulations for e-commerce as well as for logistics which is a large industry in itself uh so there are the separate regulations somewhere and a typical postal sector uh emerging and diversifying including the technology aspects so there are i mean at least i see four different very closely linked areas where there are different regulatory frameworks in many countries so in that scenario how a postal sector specific regulatory framework based on self-regulation which includes express industry if i refer it to industry may evolve and that should also be conducive for for being uh i use the word laboratory it was a nice word or you can say in cubation center for startups so how that principles for that kind of a regulation may evolve what are your views or anyone else can also comment thank you very much pranoy excellent question i'll pass it to kathryn first and then open it up to the other panelists kathryn well thank you for the question it's um how much time do we have uh i'm going to claim five minutes from the second panel because we did start five minutes late so we've got about approximately eight minutes now eight minutes okay thank you i will not spend all those eight minutes but when um when we talk about the regulation of the e-commerce in europe it's already regulated by um by the dsa we have this regulation on the digital service act so in europe it's already uh not a hard regulation but it's already some um some kind of regulation that's also the post operators will have to to deal with so but what we also see uh is if the market does not respond the way the regulators think it would do it's very easy to uh to go to the regulations to have to impose uh hard you have to do this you have to give me the information uh we need all these details and then it's not that easy to go back to soft regulation again so we see the discussions um in in europe uh how to to now deal with the 24 um quality of service indicators uh some of them are maybe are not that relevant anymore but so we have to to take them into account since they're written uh hard law and so it's not uh it's not an easy answer how to to um to deal with this in uh in the regulation since the market is very broad and first we have to agree on uh the the scope of what we are discussing and that's uh that's the first uh step so it's um yeah i hope it's uh it's okay okay did um did i have any other panelists wish to address that particular question okay i don't see you sir siva sir brian god please oh thank you thank you siva um yes i was going to say um the concept of self-regulation in my view it goes hand in hand with standardization and i mean industry standards the development of industry standards which you know can be um enforced by the industry itself so we cannot talk about uh about self-regulation when there is no framework for the sector to self-regulate and right now um in my view the most immediate vehicle through which that would happen is through development of industry standards and again we have to go back to the question of what are the regulatory outcomes that you are seeking what are you looking for as a result of this self-regulation if you are looking for uh universality for instance what sort of standards can you set as an industry to ensure that that happens because if there are shortcomings in in in that standardization regime there will always be a case for the regulator then to intervene so i just wanted to bring that perspective uh on the issue of self-regulation that it goes hand in hand with the ability of the sector to develop industry standards that are acceptable thank you siva thanks thanks very much brian um i just have one last question and we'll wrap up the session um sorry sir we're going to only have time for one more session i have the p o c chair standing on the side waiting to take the podium and i'm not going to keep him standing for too long um the secretary general of papu sir you have the floor uh thank you very much siva for sitting the floor to me i'll try and shorten my question seeing that the p o c chair is impatient by his corner there um i i i have a question to uh the regulators seeing that innovation has really caused a lot of uh havoc in terms of what they do um we have uh composite regulators where they regulate the postal sector uh and the telecoms sector and we also have postal regulators that are just purely regulating postal um entities but we have seen that uh some uh innovations like your drones they then uh tend to gravitate towards other sectors like uh you now need to bring in a spectrum management which literally has nothing to do with the a postal regulator a few postal regulator my question is to what extent do we have collaborations between regulators of our sector and other regulators of other sectors uh whose work is also overlapping into uh our sectors so that at the end of the day we can achieve the regulatory objectives thank you thank you secretary general i i suspect that it varies from country to country but i might ask hero to talk in the columbian context how that is handled in columbia we have a specificity we're promoting healthy use for the regulatory in an area where all of these innovations are something that uh the operators are trying to deal with in a controlled arena i'm just thinking really fast we are looking at our regulations and we're trying to decide who is it that puts the rules into play and how do we protect people what are the rules so that we can allow new operators who want to come into the market to come in we need to analyze and smooth out our regulations lighten them sometimes when they need to be our regulator that is that community the communications commission that has the role of the regulatory play uh postal player does have stakeholders who participate when we look at the different technologies and the evolutions that are taking place and they accompany our ministry of communications and information technologies they work with different operators different sizes of operators because it's easy for them to have technological acquisitions for the smaller ones it's a little more complex and so the ministry is one of the stakeholders is trying to promote a pilot program so that we can develop this over the next year to see what kind of technological changes we can set up with the regulatory body we then will have a tool that is a controlled tool under the regulations that can be used we can find out whether it's needed and see how it can be best used in the country thank you very much hero and with that i have come to the end of our panel session i want to thank all of the panelists and if i could ask you all to kindly give them a a big round of applause that would be much appreciated thank you everyone thank you thank you so much siva kathleen hurrah louise you were here and also our remote participants no it wasn't a form for regulation it was indeed the innovation forum and we saw how innovation has an impact on regulations as well and i really liked the last question which was posed i think that's a really important question to ask ourselves let's move on now to panel two innovation in the postal sector what are the main challenges and the way forward for successful postal innovation tomorrow a fascinating topic which is going to be moderated by wendy who i would invite to come up to the podium we have here with us mr alexander hanning i'm reading the right list this time from postinoga please come up and we also have the lug to have the president of brazil post with us mr peshoto vieraneto i apologize my pochise is far from being perfect online we have two people that we know very well welcome to miss paula pichonieri who is the director of public policy at the usps office of the inspector general paola are you with us paola hello yes i'm here okay everyone welcome paola welcome back to burn thank you very much and and hong may are you with us hong may hello my friends hello hello okay good to have you we prefer to have you here but we understand why you're not here and welcome and wendy floris yours of course thank you john paul good morning everyone so i have the pleasure to moderate this second panel on innovation in the postal sector and in this panel we would be exploring a wider variety of practical innovations that enhance the post products and services which is great for me because as some of you may know i am coordinator here at the upu for products and services so i hope to learn a lot from this session i'm also secretary of the poc so now that i've introduced myself wendy atan i'd like to introduce our other panelists we have mr alexander henning who has an extensive background in working in startups and consulting for the past five years he has led innovation at norway post which is great because uh norway post was voted as the most innovative company in 2019 and 2021 he's also famous for wearing brightly colored sneakers and he's doing so today i have those sneakers too i just to note our next speaker is mr floriano pisciotto via netto and mr netto has 40 years experience in command and management and human resources logistics and operations he has served as the president of coreos brazil since 2019 prior to this role he was minister of state head of general secretariat of the presidency of the republic and a member in two periods of the un peace missions component in Haiti i think you're going to have a lot to share about with us about innovation now online we have miss paula pisionary who is the public policy director with the usps oig research and insights the solution center risk that is the acronym and risk explores strategic ideas for ways to enhance the viability and efficiency of the postal service she joined usps oig in 2011 and her team has published numerous white papers covering a variety of global and domestic postal policy policy innovation operational and strategic topics you can find a lot of these research papers online in the oig's website and last but not least very important miss hong may dong who i'm sure most of us know she is the management managing director for international business at china post we all know she has extensive knowledge in the upu activities and many years experience in international postal business and operations for china post she's also currently the vice chair of the poc so now let's get down to business i'm going to ask our my first question to paula pisionary who's online and paula i hope you're ready okay yes thanks good is so the question is is postal innovation just tech or much more considering your experience what has been the main areas of innovation in the past few years and what factors are critical to successful innovation you have the floor paula and first of all thank you very much for inviting me to this panel it's a very timely topic and i'm always happy to talk about innovation even when it's still night out so but back to your question so postal innovation is definitely much more than technology non-tech innovation such a business model innovation or innovation in the design of processes networks or customer experiences has been as impactful in our industry as technological innovation and one successful example that comes to my mind is work sharing which has been a really true game changer in the u.s. market however what emerged from our research is that over the past few years technology and especially digital and operational technologies together with advanced data analytics have indeed been the main drivers of transformation in the u.s. postal and logistic factors and the investment in technology of the u.s. carriers and logistic players have been directed mostly at expanding improving and further automating their capacity to process packages and also improving the delivery performance including offering same day and next day delivery and as for data analytics we saw an increased use of advanced data analytics tools especially in operations to both increase the visibility and control across networks and then better predict volume and volumes and workload and also the postal service as stated in its 10-year plan that intends to invest 20 billion which is half of the planned capital investment for the next 10 years in its mail and package processing network so in the u.s. as i think like everywhere covid has been an accelerator of innovation and changes in not any innovations that that normally will have taken maybe years to deploy have been implemented in in record time i think for example of all the new contactless products and services that were developed almost overnight to address customer concerns about health and public health policies and looking at the practices that have allowed the carriers to quickly respond to these covid related challenges there are many lessons learned that could help speed up innovation processes in general so what are some of these lessons so first the go came from the top so the need to implement change and do it fast was a priority shared that all organization levels from senior leadership down to the unit and fit levels directions were clear everybody in the organization acted in response to clear needs objectives and expectations and then the cross-functional coordination was essential to fast implementation so having dedicated project management teams composed or representatives of the various units involved in key initiatives could directly report to senior management significantly helps speed things up and break silence and also relaxing certain internal processes and bureaucracy which was done to react to the emergency also help as well as an increased tolerance for failure and then finally data analytics and the meant forecasting functions were key in driving operational decisions so although that is not really proven formula for success applying these practices that any organization can do that in their own way can help the pace and the success chances of innovation initiatives that however i think there is a type of innovation the more for what looking the more destructive focused on less proven ways of doing things that might not thrive in this structure framework for that type of innovation i think a scant team almost isolated from the rest of the company who thinks without restrictions and has a larger room to try and fail might be able to generate like those groundbreaking solutions the more structure approaches might not deliver so separating the two processes like the structured innovation from like the more destructive innovation might be a good idea thank you paula thank you gave us really a lot of information in in your intervention i really appreciate that some of the takeaways you mentioned was that innovation should come from the top and that there should be given clear direction and cross functional coordination is very important and i really liked increased tolerance for failure i think that that's important as well when we're taking on new technologies and new innovations but now let me turn to brazil's experience and let me ask floriano because also brazil is a huge company so i'd like to know that in your country with such different geographical and economical economic realities how is innovation being used by corios to ensure the universal access to services and goods and to reduce the gaps between the different regions thank you very much good morning ladies and gentlemen and this is our daily challenge as you mentioned brazil is a huge country with five different natural regions so five different cultures expectations desires and this condition interferes a lot in the way we're doing our business and corios is the only institution which is present in all cities and towns of brazil a number of about 5600 municipalities but also brazil is the first country to introduce 5g technology and its communication resource and this condition will help us a lot to to answer everyone the man who's no matter where man they are or he or she is so to deal with this we we think that beyond technical and technological services we must have an initiative approach or change a little bit what we do in our business and for this reason we we reinforce very much the the sense of customization in other words we put customers in the center of everything we do in our business as a way to compensate that difference that we have already mentioned before so in the past we used to tell our customers what their needs their expectations should be but today they tell us exactly how when and where they want they need to be answered and then we need to to rethink to change and that's the way that we strengthen very much the sense of customization and when you talk about customization innovation is something essential is an important part of it and just to highlight this relation the relation between the two concepts i bring some examples of courrails to illustrate them how we start with the courrails imports which is a single window where customers they can find everything they need to import their goods for example information on how to deal with courrails how to follow customers guidelines directions and everything else so customers can buy whatever they want no matter where they are using this new platform another example are the lockers we have installed lockers all around brazil and this new facility this new service help a lot of customers to access their products again where they are no matter where they are and late delivery delivery at the next door changing or reviewing routes less to my routes based on traffic algorithms these are just a few i mean examples on how courrails have already inserted innovation in our business but i go back to the first idea of customization because we strongly believe that customizations is the secret to to answer customers in the exact way they need us and there is no way to disconnect customization from innovation by the way it's the opposite we need to put these two concepts together to have a better purpose in answering our customers expectations thank you for that customization i think we have a new word in the lingo of upu i think that's a great word and as you said customerization is beyond tech and innovation and it's really the way we should do our business the the examples you gave of courios import and lockers and delivery options but another thing that our customers are asking us for more and more in the post is focus on the environment and now i'm going to turn to you alexander because recently we celebrated world post day with a focus on environmental sustainability of postal activities and we know that norway has been forward looking in this respect could you tell us how innovation is helping design a greener postal customer journey in norway and particularly what's next in this area well that's a really good question and thank you and the end thank you everyone for having me so we're part of the problem all of us ten years ago norway post we were two percent of all of norway's cot emissions two percent the airline traffic was three percent to put it in perspective huge problem but we invested a lot in in green technology electric cars or electric trucks and now we're down 50 percent in ten years so we're down to one percent and we continue that journey and that's very important of course but it's a bigger problem and that is a lot of the big problems in the world like cot emissions like biodiversity clean air it's all linked to one thing that's material extraction we extract materials and use them only once the world is now 8.6 percent circular that means that 91 percent we use it once and throw it away and that cannot continue so we need to move the world from a linear economy to the circular economy and you mentioned my shoes and these are actually made from recycled ocean plastics and that's the way forward so that's the good thing is that we see a path forward to a more circular environment a circular economy to help their environment but the good thing for us as postal operators is one thing is that that still needs transportation so when they pick this plastic out of the ocean it needs to be transported to a factory that can make it into a yarn and then moved to a shoe factory to make it a shoe and then to the store to sell it to me so that means we need a lot of completely different products and services to support a whole whole society into a more circular economy and of course when i want to sell them why can't i use your lockers in brazil and i can put them in a locker and then someone else can buy them from the locker i mean we need to use the capabilities we have now in you and different ways and the last example i want to show you or talk about is e-commerce and i'm sure a lot of you bought a lot of stuff online during the pandemic and usually you get the big box don't you and you open it and there's a lot of plastic wrapping and plastic and there's a small product inside is that a good feeling no it's it's a bad like you talked about the customer journey that's a bad customer journey and it's bad for us as postal operators because we move a lot of air we can pack our trucks much much more compact and reduce our CO2 emissions if we can reduce the size of the box and a lot of us sell packaging like we do in all our post office we sell packaging so already self packaging but moving to the circular economy is not only about recycling it's about reusing repairing and getting actually innovating on business models getting new business models so actually we developed this together with e-commerce stores this is a reusable e-commerce packaging so an envelope made out of recycled plastic it has a velcro you can open it and we can sell this not as a product to e-commerce stores but as a service so e-commerce will actually have this as a service so they will get the supply of these they will fill your products and then the customer they can send it to the customer of course the customer if there's something wrong with the product they can return it back to the store in the same packaging or they can put a gift in it and send it to a friend if it's a birthday or if they don't want it they can actually put it empty in their mailbox we'll pick it up we'll clean it and then send it back to the e-commerce store and this is the kind of business model animation i think the post-sector we need more of thank you thank you alexander i really can relate to your story about receiving a big box with a little item inside and the feeling of you know guilty that that i ordered this and it came that way so seeing your new packaging is really interesting and i hope that's something that other posts take on as well you also were talking about reuse repair new business models regarding e-commerce and now i'm going to turn to hong mei from china because we know that china is considered as one of the most innovative postal and logistics markets in the world and i'd like to ask hong mei why did china leapfrog over the last two decades and where do you see china post in the coming two decades and how will innovation support this journey towards the next generation of postal services hong mei you have the floor okay hong mei go ahead now i can hear you now okay would you repeat your question i'm sorry certainly sorry hong mei so as many consider china as the most innovative postal and logistics market in the world why did china leapfrog over the last two decades and where do you see china post in the coming two decades especially how innovation will support this journey towards the next generation of postal services okay thank you and thank you for your question can you hear me yes we can okay so i'm very happy to join this discussion and i would like to share with you that for china and china post for the for the past decade we have been enjoying for a faster growth of the cp market not only for china post but the whole industry and the main driven factor is the e-commerce not only cross-border e-commerce but domestic services as well and i would like to share with you that for last year the cp market the the traffic volume is over 120 billion pieces for the cp market and most of the traffic are driven by the e-commerce e-commerce market so and and the second way i would like to highlight that for china post we are living in a very competitive world and the logistics companies have been growing very fast for the past decade and for cross-border e-commerce players and also the logistic players they have been growing even faster for the past five years so but actually for china post for domestic services our market share is only about 10 percent so we have to you know innovate every day according to the our chairman of the group he says that we must innovate otherwise we cannot survive with we cannot survive in this industry so every month we have a monthly analysis and we have to compare with the integrators the competitors and who also have to react very quickly to the market and as as sieve mentioned in the panel one that innovation is not only technology and for china post we we believe that the business business model innovation is more important and i would like to share with you some practices i cannot say best practice but some practices of our international services so the first is the linehole innovation for the past few years as we have already experienced the the pandemic you know after the outbreak of the pandemic we have lost most of our air capacity so we have to change through the air conveyance by the passenger trains to the charter flight and also the self-owned capacities as you may know that china post we have our own you know poster airlines for both the domestic and also international transportation in the past we focused mainly on the domestic transportation and after the outbreak of the pandemic we we are now expanding to the international linehole transportation and i would like to you know express my sincere thanks for the for those postal operators who have very close cooperation with china post for the past few years and i would like to share with you that we are expanding you know our self-owned airlines in the next few years to have a more stable linehole solution and the second i would like to share with you is about the the tailored solution to our customers in the past our postal product like packets no matter a small packet or e-package used to be popular for the for the merchants or the marketplaces but for the last few years they have changed their business model from 3 p.m to 4 p.m so our you know postal products are not the very popular to them they have better control for the logistic fulfillment so under such circumstances we have to you know have a solution tailored solution to our customers no matter merchants or the marketplaces so now we have started to provide with them in addition to the current traditional services we provide door-to-door delivery door-to-port to port based on their basically their demand so and even sometimes we we have developed the you know logistics fulfillment together with our customers so this is another innovation we i would like to share with you and then the third innovation i would like to share with you is that about our import case for for china we not only we are buying globally and also sell globally so we we have a lot of import traffic for china post based on the current postal customs clearance we cannot satisfy the needs for for our customers because the chinese people used to buy you know high value goods from the overseas countries so based on these circumstances we have provided not only postal customs clearance but also the cross-border e-commerce clearance this is created by china customs and also the general you know general international trade clearance so we are very happy to develop this services together with our postal partners and if you have the interest please contact with me or my colleagues anytime we believe we need to work together and try to you know survive in this very competitive world so this is some information i would like to share with you at this stage and if you have further questions i'm happy to take thank you hong may for that um at 120 billion pieces of e-commerce per day i'm sure you do have to innovate every day to survive in your industry so so thank you for sharing with that with us and also bringing up the need to innovate in in business models that that was very very interesting and having said that i'd like to turn back to floriano and now ask you in light of also what hong may has said to assume you are a successful startup entrepreneur in postal and logistics activities in latin america what would you bring to the postal and logistics market this is a very important answer i'll try to summarize some ideas i would bring the necessity to reach everyone according to his or her specific demands or desires and this takes me back to that concept of customization uh for cource customization today is the most important word as a second idea i think that helping our customers and partners on how to synchronize their the use of of technology so we can make our space latin america a common arena to discuss everyone needs and ideas and situations in that sense i believe that the postal network is an important tool because it can put together purses and businesses no matter where they are in a very deeply discussion but i would like to add some examples on how brazil is responding the growing demand of the cross border e-commerce just to give you gentlemen ladies and gentlemen idea cource today we have three international centers which we are not supporting the cross border demands so up to to the next year december of the next year we'll have three new ones by the way two of them will be inaugurated this year until december of this year and the biggest one will be ready to operate uh next year in 2023 in san paulo i have already signed an MOU with the administration of the airport of guarulhos to have a space of about 100 000 square meters and then we double our capacity to answer the cross border demands and we believe that doing that we will be also ready to to help to to to relate with our neighbor countries in what they need in terms of also cross border demands so this is what you think about it and in the way that brazil the role of brazil play in in in south america regarding to this growing and important cross border demands so it's all about again cross border demands customization pleasing your customer as hung may said tailorizing services using innovation to tailorize your services to to please your customer to satisfy your customer so now alexander i'm going to turn to you and i'm going to ask you to assume that you are not a postal customer in 20 years from now what would bring you back to the post well that's an excellent question and a lot of us are old organizations you're 200 years old we're 375 and a post is 400 now 400 and something years old and i think we're at a cross road now that we need to stay relevant because if i'm not the customer for 20 years it's going to take a lot to get me back so i think that's the big challenge for all of us is how can we still be relevant for customers how can we still be in contact with customers because as you know with e-commerce when the when the customer buys from the e-commerce store and they might not even see what the name of the the religious company is if it's the postal company or some competitor and then it's delivered in maybe a multi-user locker they don't know who put it in the multi-user locker or they develop they put it in your mailbox i don't know who put it in the mailbox then we're invisible and i think that's a huge challenge for us to actually be still owning the customer relations still be be a part of that so for one instance what we've done is we have expressed delivery drivers in all the major cities in the nordics we had that for many years and of course they do business to business parcels delivery but we saw what else can we use that capability for and one idea was that there's a lot of small stores in the city center people live not that you know outside in the suburbs can we connect those small stores with the consumers through our express delivery like a fedora uber eats kind of thing but as a marketplace so we created a new brand called amoy and we connected as a digital platform so we have the customer relationship customer goes to our platform to order that's new for us we're not used to owning the customer in that way people order will actually collect from multiple stores so unlike for duro was you know one restaurant to one person or he breeds one person you can actually buy across all these small stores like cheese butcher bakery and get one single delivery at your home and then we actually get a cut of the profits in addition to getting paid for delivery so you both own the customer we take the payment we get a cut of the sales and we also get paid for delivery which is business model innovation that's what we all need to do thanks thanks for that that was really really interesting again though very customer-centric innovation driving ways to improve your customer service and the customer experience as well so so that's great and I think that now I would like to turn to Hong May and just ask her that taking to into mind that we're living in this digitally open world with trade who do you think are going to be the greater the winners of this greater openness through international postal exchanges we keep talking about cross borders so who do you think will be the winners okay thank you thank you very much for your question this is a very difficult and interesting question and but to my understanding you know if we want to win the future we have to follow three perspectives the first is customer perspective or market perspective and the second is the competitive perspective so we have to be you know we have to stay very competitive and the third should be the best practice perspective and we have to learn from our you know competitors and also the best practices from the industry so I'm happy that you know POC for this session has started to you know to study the the new business model like B2B2C and I hope that we can work together to have more you know solutions based on the changing market and customer need and I hope that you know UPU by the joint effort of all of us UPU will be the winner as a whole that's in my comment thank you very much thank you for that Hong May so the customer perspective competitive perspective best practice perspective very important and also recognizing that the POC is using innovation and new business models recognizing the the proposed B2B2C product development that we're working on and also saying that you hope the UPU will be a part of the solution so keeping that in mind I'd like to turn to Paula now and ask Paula to assume that you are the UPU DG what would you do to support innovation in the postal community and as the first female DG how would you support women's participation in innovation what an endeavour so well a few years ago I had a similar assignment in real life when I had the opportunity to set up an innovation practice at the EDOIG so based on that experience so my first step will be the creation of the innovation center in charge of managing an innovation program and this is a step that the UPU is already undertaking so through the ongoing creation of an innovation lab and of a knowledge center and think tank at the IB and I think this is key to give ownership structure and direction to the innovation initiatives then I will make sure that the process of defining the portfolio of activities of the innovation team be an iterative one including a member countries perspective on how the center could better support their innovation needs which I'm sure will be very different from region to region and then however the activities of an institutional innovation center like the IB1 will be are generally organized around four pillars knowledge creation best practices exchange training and promotion and there are several initiatives that could be undertaken under these four pillars and just to offer some examples of what these like innovation and research teams could do they could for example conduct research on the major areas of innovation and innovation priorities in member countries they could map innovation trends in the industry and also regularly monitor the evolution of member countries that innovation practices and this could be done in the form of a periodical survey of both postal operators and maybe consultative committee members it could be done through partnerships with academic institutions and other entities and the outcome of these research activities could be a periodical report on innovation trends priorities and best practices in the global postal and logistics sectors and this will also this this information will also help the UPU innovate its product portfolio accordingly the UPU train posts would provide the training on innovation practices or on how to innovate product and processes so to shed light on the major techniques to do that another idea is creating a sort of like mentoring program facilitated by the UPU where posts with a higher level of expertise in innovation will be matched with a less experienced one so this could take the form of like internship or details of experts from like post that intend to develop innovation activities to post that have a long-standing innovation units and finally there could be like an annual innovation award the pricing the best innovation submitted by members but now to tackle the second part of your question so as the first female DG I will be definitely focused on reaching the gender gap in innovation which is still significant so women still like submit less patterns they are underrepresented in the IT and digital related industry which are those that drive innovation that even like less female funded startups and one general policy is to address the gender gap and promote female leadership in the workplace can help addressing the gender gap in innovation will benefit from some specific measures for example going back to the initiatives to promote the innovation in the postal community that I mentioned before each of these actions could have also initiatives to increase a female participation in innovation for example when launching a survey to map the status of postal innovation in member countries specific gender related metrics and questions could be added the exchange of best practices could in between posts would incorporate like practices to assure assure gender balance in innovation teams train posts could offer specific training modules targeting women and also internship opportunities could be reserved to women a potential UPU award that could have like a category highlighting female innovation and then I was also thinking that maybe when the UPU quality of service fund awards like funding to projects on modernization and innovation those that have me female like a representation in the implementation team they're maybe like score higher just to offer some ideas well thank you very much for that Paula that's a lot of very good practical information I'm glad to see that at least the UPU is on track we have now just initiated a new innovation center and think tank in the DPRM so which you mentioned would be good and also you know taking into consideration the four pillars were definite that you mentioned the knowledge best practice and training I think we're on the good track I really liked your proposal to make an annual innovation prize that might be some that's very interesting thought as well so it's fun so now it's the time that we get to open the floor for questions from the floor so I hope that there will be some oh there's way in the back it's Walter Tresik the chairman of the consultative committee you have the floor thank you thank you very much for recognizing the consultative committee I have a very specific question and I guess it was not touched upon today the postal sector is a very people-centric sector so our employees are most important how can we ensure that all this this new environment technology coming in does not create a situation where they're left behind inclusion is very important yes but it's a people business we need to ensure that they're educated they're on track I think innovation without our people out there serving a daily fantastic service is highly important and I think we should include them thank you which one of our panelists would like to answer Florian as I just like to to say that you cannot reach innovation first innovation is not technology innovation and we offer doing things so have to change the culture have to change the mindset of the folks that work I mean for you so there is no way to separate employees or our our force of work I mean working force from innovation they have they need to go along in the same track so once you change that the company will be extremely benefit with the innovation you can put your personnel inside the same boat now having them together to reach the steps that you have already planned for for the future we have this experience in couriers so there is a deeply a very huge communication deep communication between the administration and the workforce to a very tuned synchronized communication between the two sectors just expressing showing them that the company can not go along go ahead even having new communication innovation technology as part of the innovation without the the working force and engagement and we are succeeding on that with a great level of cooperation is that good great any is would anyone other the other panels like to add anything before we go back to the floor yeah sure so as Walter said I mean innovation is first and foremost like a person centered like endeavor the end so sometimes what really prevents like innovation to flourish in a organization is a very a very human feeling it's like a fear fear of like a career impact of criticism or like failure of dealing with the uncertainty and then so what can be done to really encourage innovation in possible organization and mitigate these fears so I would say that making innovation an explicit requirement of professional success is one possibility for example at the here the office of inspector general so innovation and ability to lead the change is part of our performance evaluation so it's one of the factors that then it's important to framing innovation and this is to come from leadership because this is really leadership like task to do that to promote an innovation culture so framing innovation as a fundamental to the organization success and then it's important to give recognition and and reward the innovators and it's important also to make innovation like the norm establishing routines like innovation days hackathons and so meeting free days where people are like free to to think so we have these initiatives within our organization we have hackathons innovation days and sometimes are just internal for us internal to exchange ideas and come up with ways to innovate with the work we do so take the fear out of innovation and normalize it in the in the workforce great um oh Simba I see you're asking a question sorry Wendy and I didn't mean to impose but um there are a couple of points that I think are worth sort of thinking about a bit more one is the point that paula made and that is how do you create space for people who are engaged in thinking through innovation in an organization and by space I mean two things one is the time and resources that's one and the second is um a culture which recognizes that you're not going to get innovative solutions business models technology without the investments that are required and those investments take a fair bit of time before they are realized in terms of benefits I'd love to hear from paula as well as Hennig on this because I think you know some of the more innovative organizations do recognize this and and it's important thank you thank you for that question Siva and this is kind of the core of all corporate innovation I do a lot of keynotes and speeches for other corporates as well as postal companies and the key thing that separates those who succeed the corporate innovation for those who fail is CEO buy-in if you don't have the top management and the CEO with you because it takes as Siva said resources it takes time to develop you need to have not only you know the people who is going to run away and find up new new ideas right you also need to get the rest of the organization and operational side with you so when they come with a good idea say we want to try this as a terminal or try this as a post office if they say sorry we're we've been measuring quality only and we don't have time for you the innovation dies but if top management says you're going to take some time because this is important long term for the corporation then you can succeed thank you for that observation before going back to Paula seeing as we have the CEO of brazil posed with us maybe we can ask you if you think that that is true that you have to have the CEO buy-in for innovation as I have said before innovation is not going to be not confused with technology I I understand very much what has been said and I have no words to to compliment but I do like at the end of this this conversation I do like to address few words to the upu relate to innovation in the in other in another sense Paula would you like to address the question yeah sure so to get the buying of leadership so it's important to demonstrate that these innovation initiatives have benefits that leadership wants to see a return on investment they want to be able to easily track the the progress of the innovation program this means that it's key to focus on tracking and reporting the right innovation metrics for example alignment with business strategy impact on cost and revenues competitive competitiveness and and agility gains level of risk involved effort required these are like the most popular metrics that help qualify and quantify the value of an innovation program and this will help reassure executives that innovation is going to where it really matters for the business and there is a clear vision of the benefits and the risks involving in that and once trust in innovation has been gained then it can be brought a little farther each time thank you Paula is anyone else asking for the floor does anyone else have another question yes the United States thank thank you Wendy I just had a clarifying question for Hongmei and thank you for sharing all that information about the innovation at China Post Group I just wasn't quite sure I understood one of the comments that you made concerning the tailored solutions and you have changed your model I thought it you said from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. is that like a time of day for acceptance or is that something different thank you I think I meant percent so three so we were two percent of Norway's total CO2 emissions and we reduced down to one percent no I think the question was for Hongmei sorry similar names okay thank you thank you for the question I'm sorry I didn't make it clear when I you know speak last time so the changing from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. is the strategy from the customers especially the marketplaces for example for the marketplaces they use to you know use our postal product and we we have control the end-to-end service but currently they have more control of the logistic fulfillment so they call the 4 p.m. and we can only provide part of the services like for example they they can only for example they have their own air capacity then we will only provide part of the delivery or part of the collection and for some of the customers they only you know want to use our air capacity then we can provide services you know from port to port so this is the major changes we can only provide you know part of the services so we are now selling solution or service instead of a traditional postal product I hope I clarify your question thank you thank you Hongmei and now as I see the POC chair is waiting there I'm just going to give Floriano one more chat the to close for us actually I want to be very brief on that but I speaking about innovation I'd like to thank the UPU for the strong support provided to Correios in the implementation of the RFID pilot project which has happened for for years as part of the quality of the of service funds with that support now we have implemented the RFID technology and all treatment or sorting and distribution centers within Brazil so this is a good opportunity to again to thank you for that initiative and we took that opportunity to innovate as part of of progress as part of the evaluation of our company thank you very much well thank you for that and it's a nice note to end this panel noting that the UPU is supporting innovation in our member countries and so thank you for that and I'd like to thank all of our panelists for this lively discussion this morning and I think they deserve a really strong hand of applause bravo Wendy that all went very well I'd like to thank Paula as well Hongmei thank you all for your participation and I think that it was a very interesting panel it's time for us to conclude this morning our deputy director general is going to give us his conclusions on this first innovation in the postal sector forum hello yeah I'll do it in a less traditional way and thank you Kayla and Paul for providing me the notes but I will do it in a way differently innovation is also about people and maybe some of you remember when I was here in Spring CA I said that we will not offer you a plastic bottle anymore so this is in a way an example and I did my best second thing is again your opinion matters so please take the survey take it and we would like to share it and from a part of the executive management Metocissan and myself we have here today that the managers or the management they should support innovation and you have the promise from our side that we will support innovation also in this building second thing I was in a way very much impressed by the speakers two were in a way very impressive for me the CEO of a Brazilian post where are you okay I hope this is like a start of a new friendship and we would like to hear and see more of the successful CEOs in this building so thank you again from my side the second one was the guy with the excellent shoes alexander I'm amazed thank you for sharing this I can advise you already you can start to look for a heart tax tax this is a ticket which gives you a discount in Switzerland for railways and another one is do they have it in the yellow color as well okay so next time in the respect I will wear yellow shoes if I will be a moderator enjoy it it was a pleasure thank you very much just to say thank you very much and bon up we'll see you this afternoon at two o'clock for the plenary starting in this room see you then