 I'm here with David Abseck. David is from the UPU's Postal Technology Centre and Data is the subject of our discussion today. Advanced electronic data work. Electronic advanced data depends on who you're talking to, really. I guess let's start with, can you just give us an overview of what it is and why it's the subject of everybody's conversation right now? Well really it's about regulations at the beginning because you know it's a it's a messed up now. For the last couple of years in Europe or in other parts of the world and at the UPU as well it's a must-have to provide advanced electronic information for any item you want to ship. And when you say advanced electronic information, what kind of information do we have to collect? So it's a pre-advice and it's basically a customs electronic information that you have to have on every postal item. So basically to declare the content, to declare who is the origin and who is the destination person. And are we seeing that there's now a uniformity in what's required for every nation across the world? Well the requirements are very clear and uniform, they are standardized etc. But the readiness, the compliance is not the same of course. And that's what we try to solve and we just make everybody compliant. So how can a designated operator or someone like that try to become or increase and improve their compliance? Well there's a lot of technology and that's where we do all at the PTC to provide tools and services to make them capture data and more importantly capture good data. So when we look at compliance at the UPU it's not only about the quantity, it's not only to match that every single item has a declaration. But now we are increasingly looking at the quality of those declarations. And when you say quality of the declarations, what do you mean by that? It means the data. It means that every single declaration must have a certain number of mandatory data elements. So we look that those elements are there and we look also that they are well formed. Because like postal address are well formed, that the declaration itself correspond to NHS code for example. So all that is part of the compliance. And what trends are you seeing when it comes to compliance? Is it improving across the board? What is the general comments on that? It is improving but it's still a challenge in many parts of the world to organize the collection of data. Because you know when you talk about post there's a big difference with cargo. With cargo you will have X number of times the same item. With post if you have 1000 customers you will have 1000 different mail items. So organizing good quality data and the capture of this data is a challenge in certain parts of the world. And so when you're talking to some of these postal operators who are trying to improve their compliance and improve the data that they're collecting, what are some of the pain points for them? Where do they find that they need to improve? I think it's mostly about organizing different channels for collecting this information. And that's where we help because we have some web applications. We have some mobile applications now for the customers. We have a number of APIs to interface with other systems. So basically every postal organization now has multiple choice to capture information. So if you were speaking with a postal operator what would be some of the key things that you would say to them to help them achieve better compliance and indeed why it's important for them? It's really not a choice anymore. It's really not an option anymore. In certain parts of the world there's the threat that mail items will get returned if they come without that pre-advised information. So it's really not an option. So bring my messages, act, work on it and we are here to help. If somebody wants to find a postal operator, a designated operator, wants to find out more about what the UPU is doing to help delivery companies and postal operators in this regard, what should they do? Who should they contact? Well pretty much anybody at the UPU, of course in the PTC, but it's a very hot topic at the UPU. We have many people working on that at the moment. It's very high on the UPU agenda. David Abseck from the Postal Technology Centre at the UPU, thanks for joining us on voicemail today. Thank you very much.