 Okay everybody welcome back or welcome if you just join us here for the second session now. In the morning we have been discussing in our first session sustainability as I said now in our second session we are going to discuss trust and security and we all know that with the digitization of our societies of course trust and security has become really a very very hot topic and in particular when we look at the postal operators then we see actually how important trust and security has become because all the operators have been transforming massively over the past few decades and there is a lot a lot of data around and a lot of data exchange so a lot of data that needs to be secured but the situation that we are facing is of course the data or your own data to secure your own data is sometimes not enough simply because you have to deal with so many other stakeholders that can be other postal operators that can be other stakeholders like suppliers that can go on platforms such as the one of the UPU or other platforms so in the end it's not anymore only in your own domain where you have to secure the data it is also in the domains of others so because that's the very particularity of the postal system it's one big postal network and actually as it is so often the case it is only as strong and as secure as its weakest link so collaboration is of course key and I would like now to introduce the three panelists that are joining me here on the stage to talk about exactly this trust and security within the postal ecosystem we have Dr. Sivundo Givmoyer is the Secretary General of the Pat African Postal Union we have Chervis Giusefia he's the Chief Executive Officer of Seapost International and Siddharth he is the Managing Director of the Asia Pacific Post Cooperative and I would now like to ask Givmoyer to go to the lectern and and tell us a bit about the Pan African Postal Union and also your work that you are doing for your members to drive trust and security thank you very much for having me in this show it is a show like I said I have to come here and give a lecture and I want to acknowledge the Digi of UPU and all the members that are here it is indeed a privilege for me to be speaking on behalf of the Pan African Postal Union the Pan African Postal Union is an African Union Specialized Agency for Postal Services it has got 45 member states and what I'm speaking to today trust and security in the post is a very challenging exciting and complicated issue and as you can see it just came dry like that trust and security so the first thing is to contextualize trust and security within the postal sector and the first thing is for us to have a common takeoff point and agree on what we are talking about when we are referring to the post the post is a platform that connects people through exchanges and flows of information goods and money and these days we talk of logistics we talk of digital trade facilitation and in the context of that as you know that the post has been in existence for centuries and over the years it has managed to gain trust from the consumers from the partners and the postal system has always been very secure but that is a thing of the past now we are talking of a postal environment which is getting digitalized which is moving from the traditional post to the smart post office and this brings with it a number of challenges because the whole industry is moving away from its comfort zone and my talk today will center on some work which was done by some academics and these academics produced a paper which was published in a journal in 2020 and in their work what they spoke about is an indication of what the the post is in terms of sorry what the the post is in terms of the current ecosystem this ecosystem speaks to the digitalization and the the various aspects of digitalization which are embraced within the post the first and most important issue is that the post has to come up with a digital business model which allows customers to have direct access and also the post has to integrate the digital services right across its various components as you know the post is more like effective which has no walls people can work from any direction so therefore it is important that everyone within the postal channel understands and plays a role in the digital space and because of this ecosystem the post is now able to bring in various components like your cloud computing, authentication and fraud detection systems, big data analytics internet of things, smart sensors and what this does is it creates an environment where now clients or customers can trace their their items along the the conveyance belt they no longer need to rely to be given information at given times but now they can simply go and check on where their items are and what this does is it leads to a model a postal model that moves the post from the traditional to this smart post office and what this is entailing is that there could be interventions at three levels one is the migration of services from the current traditional to the digital platform the other is the creation of products that add value and the last one is the improvement of the current products through value addition so that they are able to move the post to the digital space in a research which was done by my Kinsey in 2020 there are issues that came out from that research and these issues indicate one the fact that there is going to be an increase in the deliveries of e-commerce items in the year 2025 and the other important issue is that 70% of the respondents believe that consumers will use postal apps which means the post has no option but to move to the digital space and now the the question is how can the post build trust and security in a digitalized environment like we said they have now moved from the traditional space where they were very comfortable to the digital environment and the first is that the post must ensure that digitalization touches everyone within the organization they should also rely on AI based technologies to improve productivity this could be on mail and parcel handling it could be on digital smart digital post boxes it could be on transport and logistics to calculate the most efficient routes and also it could be on the issue of introducing autonomous vehicles drones we have seen that so there are various technologies that the post needs to to take on board and what this would do is that it would improve the business reliability and the use of intelligent estimates for the post to be able to tell in terms of our trends be they sees now be they events or parcel volume predictions and what then this would do is it empowers the customers to be able to predict when their items would be delivered and the most important area that needs to be addressed is on risk management like I said moving to an unfamiliar environment for the post which is the digitalized environment brings in a lot of challenges like cyber attacks and theft of information there is need for data protection so all this has to be managed by the postal entities and finally the last two issues relate to market awareness for the post to have interactive websites where customers can get information and they can also have chatbots where customers can get in there and give an information as to the products as to where their items are and any other questions that they they could have and finally all this has to happen in an environment where customer I mean where employees are capacitated and trained for a digital readiness I see my time is up and I would want to stop here thank you thank you very much Jevis C post international trust and security for you is of course when you look also at the international business extremely important so maybe you can share a bit about what you are doing and how you can establish trust and security of course connectivity you can stay seated you can go up there to recognize as you wish so how do you move how do you change this life you have to press the green button okay good morning all how are you doing first of all I would like to recognize Mr Mitoki DG and also everyone present and I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak for the ones that don't know Kurosawa is a Dutch Caribbean island located just off the coast of Venezuela with a total land area of 444 square kilometers the population size is about 160 inhabitants and the population is multicultural and also multilingual we speak a minimum of four languages on the island and that is Dutch English Spanish and of course our native language called Papiamento C post international is the national postal operator and it has been for the last couple of years on a transformative journey to become a modern and trusted postal and logistic service provider our vision is to become the regional leader in the Caribbean by providing innovative and client-focused delivery solutions thus enhancing the business and general public experience one of the things I learned early in my first business class at the university is that a good sign of a business is repeat customers the challenge is how do you guarantee a steady flow of repeat customers in today's business environment whereby customer demands are constantly changing the solution in my opinion is very simple and that is to create proven trusted and secured postal services in order to enhance the customer experience we have developed many payment solution within C post one of them that we are very proud is is the self kiosk that we developed and to support one of our services and this services is called Punto Mio it's an online shopping solution whereby customers can online can shop online in the US and also in Europe their purchases are being shipped to a centralized warehouse managed by one of our partners and subsequently the shipments are shipped to Curacao for processing and delivery in the past even though we have home delivery the majority of our customers like to go to the post office to retrieve their packages it was so that in the beginning of this service people would stay or stand in line at least one to 1.5 hours they would even bring their launch boxes with them and in some worst cases they would leave the post office without collecting the packages so with technology we have streamlined the business and we introduce the self kiosk whereby the customer can go directly to the this kiosk key in their unique customer number select that they're ready to pick up packages pay for the for the packages and retrieve the packages at the corner within 5 to 10 minutes now this solution has greatly improved customer satisfaction satisfaction and loyalty for the service next to that we have also launched this year a c-post app whereby a customer can track their packages and registered mail interact with customer service sign up for different services and even pay let's say utility bills via our e-wallet system the personal interaction through the app resulted in increased convenience and a positive customer reaction that is no longer necessary to call the customer service if you have inquiry and they have inquiry and then remain in the queue before talking to a service representative thirdly as as we speak this week we are in the process of implementing a track and trace software called smart track and this we are doing this with our uk partner partner called one world express and this allows businesses that hand over mail to us to validate the delivery of their mail piece and packages and the way they do that is by locking into the web portal and then validate the geolocation the e-signature and even a photo proof is that is required in the following year we all will also experiment with smart lockers as a pudo location c-post international is one of the few organizations still on the island that accept traditional payment meaning cash right now the many businesses on the island including banks even government are closing down their counters because they want to focus and our core business in our case we have four branches for service centers and these companies are today looking at us to help them with their payment collection so we have telecom companies we have utility companies we have even the government looking at us to help them and we are expanding our kiosk platform security in the postal environment and data integrity are crucial aspects for the provision of postal services ensuring the confidentiality and reliability of the information during the process is vital to protect both personnel and integrity of the overall data reason why we have implemented proactive 24 seven landscape scanning software to prevent hacking attempts furthermore our it department applies encrypted and secondary authentication methods to ensure a safe environment on our servers in conclusion i can say that trust and security are the cornerstones in the postal industry and are essential factors for the success and growth of any business we have to continuously invest in advanced technology to ensure that our postal services remain reliable secure and trustworthy thank you perfect thank you let's now turn to the asia pacific post cooperative and i mean the objectives of course or your mission is to drive innovation but to also enhance existing solutions to to drive cross border e-commerce among your membership so watch all this trust and security play and how do you enable that within your membership yeah thanks so um for those of you that don't know the app i thought i'd start this with a a bit of an introduction as to who we are and what we do like a lot of the cooperatives and associations in our industry this year we're coming into our 30th year of existence so it was uh it was key for me when joining two years ago that we took that 30 years of history we looked at what our purpose had been and we decided whether or not that was something we should be doing and at that point we decided it the past was the past the future is the future let's move forward so we've gone from an organization that was very much focused on basic quality of service building to an organization that's now focused on existence of post and therefore the things we need to do as a group of organizations to change and trust and security underpin that so whilst there are lots of flowery words in the mission statement the long and the short of it is that as a cooperative my job our job is to bring volume back to the post wherever possible to stop it from losing the volume that it has today and to ensure that we remain relevant in our markets both across the region as a whole but in in individual markets we do that in one of four ways and and I was a late comer to this uh this forum so uh when the question was asked you know how does the app support trust and security I cut my first answer was I'm not really sure it does and then I cut then when you start to think about that in context and you work through what does trust and security really mean there are there are lots of different pieces so of course there's data security and there's what we're doing around the world of AI and so forth but there's actually security of our existence as a industry there's security and trust in terms of our relationships with one another as posts and entities so we do what we do in four keyways we focus on commercial growth I mentioned that just a moment ago everything we do should have a a growth or at least a sustaining element to it for our posts we do it by uh customer empowerment and when we talk about customer empowerment I'll come to it in a bit more detail later but some of that is just in sitting down with those groups of customers that our posts want to be working with and finding out what they want from us it's as simple as as that really at that level collective impact all of those things that as a group impact my posts I've got 28 posts ranging from in the far west of our territory Iran far east would be Vanuatu north to Mongolia and south to New Zealand so we cover a huge area and there's actually a lot of commonality across that and then of course because where we started is operational excellence and the huge amount of trust and security elements that come into that so just giving you a look at the numbers for APP 28 members actually we're just about to increase that I think to 30 which will be nice give or take in our region something like 4.3 billion people we cover three or four of the largest population spots on earth and 53 million square kilometers covered by our posts every single day so I think uh you know Charles and various others mentioned our breadth our reach is phenomenal across that we've got about 1.3 million postal operatives and and that number varies depending on which uh statistics you're looking at but that's the best I can get to and some 500 000 post offices and 600 000 third parties the importance for our region when it comes to growth is that we're responsible for some 65 percent of all e-commerce volumes that are produced and we consume almost 60 percent of those so as a region the e-commerce market is particularly important to us both for external internationally and intra-asia-pacific and that represents something like a 5.3 billion value to the industry overall if we were to access it all so what do we do well we've got uh the nine core elements of what we do here and trust and security comes into a good number of these we now have a dedicated research and development data um within the organization that is working um really hard to understand what's coming down the road how we use things like AI what its implications for members are both in the competitive landscape and in our more traditional uh postal world we have uh some learning support platforms that are in place to make it easy for members to uh digest that sort of information and be able to increase their capacity as operators as I mentioned the operational excellence pieces um and then we go down into product elements and some of these I'm going to mention in more detail later but they are the things that really do underpin the trust elements within our membership because for all of these if you're not able to work in clear open trusting frameworks they don't work so uh e-packet that many of you will know about e-packet it's been around for a while now it's our lightweight low cost uh non-terminal juice tracked packet solution uh and is one of the few uh certainly from the data that we're seeing track packet solutions in the market they're still growing its market share and uh members are actively out and improving on what they're doing xbr which is our newly launched ddp solution for post now that came around on the back of conversations about data security and data transacting and how we make sure that our posts can move quickly in the areas that they need to uh and gateway which I'm not going to talk about in any detail now but it's coming down the line very shortly and uh it will be transformative for those members that take part the bits that really under underpin for me the um the trust elements the collaborative elements of what we do are the forums workshops and our connect program so between the forums that's where we find either smaller groups of members who have commonality across themselves we have a small island workshop uh that that is completely focused on those things that impact those economies that do not have the breadth of scale effectively we have workshops where we work on things like data security and learning lessons for example we look we had a workshop recently on the lessons learned from the royal male data hack um and they were very graceful in giving us quite a lot of data for that so it was very nice of them and then we have a connect program which is I suppose in in simple terms it's the app's version of the cc somewhat more operator focused than intergovernmental as you can imagine so we we exist on one principle as a group we are stronger united we deliver and with 28 nations that's gotta be true is the way we look at it so the the the background to that is that we've been talking for 150 years about being a network and we want to be a network network as a group so I'm going to try and shoehorn the subject into the presentation now but what what do we all so can we go backwards just one the small red button it's not don't press anything I'll I'll do a tap dance in a moment if I need to jump into your skip forward oh you're just starting in your stuff I've got another 10 minutes you poor people okay so shoehorn that in so how do we affect trust and security in our region well the first is leadership we're not afraid to have the really difficult conversations so one of those that we've started in recent times is a conversation over remailing bulk mailing and what happens when countries come foul of that we've had some well publicized issues with that in the pacific region and we're working very hard to come up with a framework that enables our posts to avoid the pitfalls of that particular minefield security the industry so you know my purpose our purpose is a cooperative is to ensure that our posts exist in a few years time and and that is the the main reason we're there that means that we sometimes have ideas that can't go forward sometimes we have great ideas that can't go forward but we have a bias towards action as a group rather than sitting back and just talking about things that's that's the principle of it and we advocate and we represent our members on various levels as I mentioned in the dialogue section which is I think the the key to both of these subjects we we have forums workshops and connect it is all about stakeholder engagement and collaboration making sure that we understand what is needed both from our industry intra and from the other industries in and advocating for that change where it's needed we're not an intergovernmental organization we don't get involved in regulation we do speak to some of the regulators we have good relationships with a number but we're not involved in negotiating that and then at a product level it's about building a suite of products that's fit for the market and ensures that our members collaborate in a secure way and that helps them to grow and to grow their trust with their customers and with their wider stakeholder groups so that's a small input on how we affect trust and security from a slightly different perspective but I hope interesting and happy to take any questions on it thank you when we when we look at trust I mean was funny yesterday I had the startup competition and there was one startup that was kind of reflecting on how the postal industry has changed over time and so there was an image to the left that showed okay black and white image old and there was written trust that was one of the leading principles and then to the right there was some fancy new delivery car and there was written speed so speed has replaced trust that was kind of the message and I thought well no that's that's not really true but what is true is probably that the concept of trust has changed over over the past few years in particular when we look at all the different types of new technologies whether it's AI or whether it's blockchain or whatever it is so how do you think how this impacts the industry this change of trust or a change of the concept of trust that is simply widening and going into different areas that have not been really so important in the past maybe Chief Moyer you have a few on that okay thank you very much for that a very important question and observation yes trust has changed in terms of how it's understood by the customers over the years you may recall that in the past when the post was traditional in its approach it would simply be carrying stuff or from people that they don't even know but successfully delivered to people that they don't know they were just relying on the addresses that are on the items and the same happened with the financial services when someone is sending money he comes presents himself to the post office and the post office accepts the money and gets the money delivered to the next person without really knowing these people but over time and during that time the customers would rely more on the information they get from the the post to say where is my item where is my money and stuff like that but now things have changed because of the technological revolution that has happened people have got information on their fingertips they can now take items the the post cannot lie to say your item is stuck at the airport because the the person will get online and see that no this item is actually sitting at the office of delivery why because of this interconnectedness of systems the value chain now you can take your item where it is at any given time so the issue of trust then means there is need for more transparency there is need for more involvement of customers in terms of where their items are and how they are treated and at the same time we now have systems that can even detect if what is being carried is something that is illegal so all this is helping to build the trust even more because we are having a situation where the operators have to account for their actions and they don't need to show their faces but the systems speak for themselves thank you in my opinion i don't think that trust has really changed i think the underlying principle is the same and for me trust is belief so customer has to continually believe in your service and that's why you have to be consistent in the features that you offered okay of course customers are more demanding in these days where the thing is you give you use technology to give them more transparency and access to the services they are purchasing from you so for me trust 10 years ago or now it's the same thing it's about a set of belief that customers have into the company and the services you offer i might have us to some some extent here i think you know look at our industry it's an inherently trust based industry for you know whether it be 500 years in the case of the portuguese post office or almost 200 years in the case of some of our our asian post offices we are based on the principles of of trust and actually the anecdotal story over there's two different stories over over why the the first postage stamps came around the anecdotal story is that one of the prime ministers of the uk upset the population and back then you had to pay to receive your letter so as an act of spite people started sending him many many letters and as they turned up he had to hand over two pennies each time otherwise he couldn't find out if it was an important letter or a piece of hate mail and he paid a lot of money for a lot of hate mail and therefore challenged the postmaster general at that point to come up with a solution for paying for your post on delivery put the pain in the the hands of the person sending instead so actually i mean you know when you look at that or the principles of why the upu was founded back in the early days or why we exist today it's an inherently trust-based industry added to that that and again i'll use some of our members as examples our longevity in our markets has given us a sort of an ingrained ability to be known by our populations we we can lose that trust and i think you know that's been proven as i say in in some of our markets but it's also proven that it's really quite easy with simple changes to win that trust back so trust underpins what we do it i i'm with her as an entirely it hasn't changed inherently as a factor there are just other things we need to bring into to play in the modern world the basics are simple provide a service that people are willing to use trusting of proud of as a as a nation and and understand i think from a post's perspective what your core roles are for the nation that you serve and actually at that point pretty much people on board of you okay thank you i look to the audience are there any questions for our panelists here then let me pick up on on one point we discussed the involvement maybe of trust over time and found that there isn't really the principle concept is the same but maybe i mean you all three come from three different regions as well and and there might be differences also in culture or in regions how you perceive trust for example so what are the expectations for example from the different societies in perceiving trust or towards trust and also security how do you think is that other differences and if so how can how can it be possible to create this you want maybe universal global concept of trust since we are talking here about a global kind of network it plays a role maybe jealous you want to start um yes if we look at the the team which was issued by the dg this year on world postal day if i recall well it says connected by trust and collaborating for a safe and secure environment i think that is very important because for the longest time post offices have played a wrong a role around the world by connecting communities and even countries um in kerosol um kerosol as i explained is a very um not a very it's a small island in the caribbean and in our case we have to always strive to deliver every time um in order to meet the expectation of the customers because since it's a small island if we don't do if we don't perform the word of mouth and especially nowadays with social media instagram and facebook they start complaining on these platforms and we have to quickly react um to these let's say sometimes accusations by the customer so um it's very very challenging for us operating in a very uh in a very small community but that's why i mentioned previously it's good to be consistent at all times so i have the privilege of representing asia pacific but i'm quite clearly not asian i come from the uk um i don't know what gives it away but um yeah i come from the uk and and i have the the remarkable privilege of of representing 28 extraordinarily diverse posts um but i but actually there are huge commonalities in what underpins that trust in the postal network whether it be royal mail in the uk uh i'm gonna signal charles out because he's here but post malaysia you know over in malaysia or or even you know china post or one of our pacific island nations it does come down to that consistency and it comes down to the way that you deal with people so as i say i'm gonna signal uh post malaysia out but primarily because they what they've done in recent times underpins pretty much the standard for what's needed in terms of uh gaining and keeping the trust of your of your uh your customers so you know from a from what we see charles perspective um and i'm lucky that i get a good a good window in on uh post malaysia what's what's happened is there's been a a distinct change in the approach to dealing with those things when they're problems and to being open about the issues that are there and telling people what you're doing to to fix that now you know asia pacific being what it is we have some countries where you need to be a little bit more direct some countries where you need to be a little bit subtle but the the thing that actually is common is honesty nobody at all minds that a problem happens so long as you deal with it in the right way um and and again fourth time i'm going to mention his name but you can go on linkedin and watch people complain about post malaysia and they do you know and and sometimes it's fair and sometimes it's unfair but the one person who tends to respond is charles as the group ceo now how many of our ceo's across the postal world would do that directly i think he's nuts for giving out his mobile number but he does it um and and and it has a you you can see immediately the switch in perception you care it's not even you know i'm sure charles passes it to someone else to deal with and and of course he should um but the reality is that that person goes from combative and complaining to actually you do care about my one item that went missing or went wrong or whatever and and and you see that in many of our posts now i'm not so many are good at maybe talking about it but um you see that uh that standard of acceptance of honesty and willingness to work with you to fix problems having a massive impact across all of the posts that i'm aware of and so i think you know that the element of trust is is look we exist we've been here for a long time we've done really good things for the country over a period of time at points we're not been so great today we didn't do so well but this is what we're going to do to fix it for you and if you work from that basis actually trust is really easy to maintain really easy to maintain i can add also to that is um in case uh when we have let's say customer complaints either on facebook or even on the radio what i will do i will personally call that person apologize for the inconvenience inconvenience cost and in that way i re-establish the trust within the post office so and most of the times customers are surprised that the ceo would call them and and then they will also confirm that they will continue to use the postal service just by the mere fact that you have called them yeah i i think there's a there's a few points at play here our history is massive i've said that already the way that we interact with our customers is different to every other industry in the world we are pretty much the only industry other than the healthcare industry that has a direct relationship with everyone we deal with we turn up at their doorsteps we've got post offices we've got physical infrastructure in the way of post boxes and now nowadays parcel lockers and shops and you know keep going you know but we are present in the life of the people that we serve every single day so one of the messages i give to our CEOs when they're talking about wanting the volume from lazada and wanting the volume from all these big platforms is remember that they're a consumer first give them a damn good service at the doorstep show them how good we are show them the world that things do go wrong of course they do it does in all logistics circumstances and post is not individual to that but when post gets it wrong post is able to own up to its mistakes and fix them that that individual relationship that each of us has with our posts and that those people have with our posts is really key to underpinning why we should continue to exist in a broad framework that we have done for a long time yes thank you i represent a region that has 55 countries but the members that belong to power 45 and when you look at these members in terms of level of development they are quite different and when you look at the population distribution is also different we have almost 60 65 percent in rural areas and the remainder in urban centers and also you look at the whole population african population it's a young population and again that determines to what extent the issue of trust is going to be followed up you know in a globalized environment like we are in now people have access to technology they can check what is happening anywhere and everywhere and if they have complaints they can express them and so what this then presents like i said before it's there is more need for transparency there is more need for accountability but the bottom line in terms of trust it's not changed because what the people want is the customer wants to send an item and it gets received at a given time in a given condition and violated if they are sending money it has to be received by the correct person and all this then brings us back to the issue of saying all these technologies they are meant to facilitate the processes of service delivery but the bottom line in terms of what trust is has not changed the the postal system has to continue to to have integrity and serve with honesty so that at the end of the day the the customers can have faith in the in the system but like my colleagues have alluded to the technologies that are available are making the the processes to be more transparent more visible and without really the people operating in in in darkness thank you thank you look again to the audience any please there's a question over here in the middle right in the middle and a question then in the back as well hi good morning my name is blaze francisco i'm a strategy manager for post in l i'm going to ask a question as a consumer i'm originally from southeast asia as you can see one of the things that we see quite heavily in southeast asia right now is the growth of um is the growth of startups in last mile delivery and usually they take advantage of the gig economy right and from what i see every time i visit um there the trust compared to the postal system is rather much higher so i guess my question is how do you see postal companies from from all of your regions react to these to these challenges because especially some of these organizations are are digital natives and it's quite interesting to see especially for my home country what's the future for them in the face of this particular pressure i think this doesn't only concern now uh asia pacific but you were referring to it but i think it can refer to really all three regions so whoever wants to go first from an apac perspective first and i the lights are too bright so i i can't really see your face but um can i ask which country you're from which okay fine i could have guessed on an accent but i wasn't going to do it just in case um so so yeah we've swapped regions yeah you're you're over here and i'm over there um and you and you're right look yeah actually the i was interested rather than it makes a difference because the the the circumstances of the startups is pretty much the same in certainly in all of the acian nations i think would be the easiest way to look at it so uh we have companies that are effectively not logistics companies they are tech companies coming in and starting up really easily and on low cost lightweight models and and stealing the volume out from under the posts feet is it trust well more often than not no not to start with its price they buy they buy the volume um do they do a good job in the areas that they can yeah on the whole they do that they're you know their service is reasonable do they give half of that mail back to my posts well 22 roughly over acian they give back to our posts because they can't possibly hope to deliver in those areas that we have zero choice but to go to because we hold that university service obligation so there's an element that i think our posts on a on a uh commercial level should actually talk about that a little bit more should make it clear that ninja van as a good example cannot deliver to half of the philippines cannot get to most of uh of um the the non-pilots are a part of malaysia easily and certainly can't cover all 17 800 indonesian islands in the way that indonesia post apos indonesia have no choice to do so that that trust is bought in my opinion on the whole it's not it's not longevity of trust that we have within post um and i think that as we see those companies and they come and they go that's the actually it's the bit that i like most about them to some degree because they kind of prove they're not so trustworthy by disappearing reasonably quickly um ninjas are an example uh a bad example of that maybe but there are plenty that have come and gone um i think to some degree they actually underpin why trust in post is is is uh both institutionally they're already and important we exist we have a we have an absolute mandate to exist it isn't a choice thing you know our government set us up at some point they may have privatized us they may have not but they still insist we do our job and they still insist that we deliver to absolutely everyone so um are they a danger yes do they are they trustworthy uh i won't say they're not trustworthy do they have long-term trust no not at the moment and until their model changes it's not hugely investment driven and therefore buying market share they can't hope to that's that's the truth so we've a lot of my my posts the the answer to what do we do about these platforms is hold your nerve you know yes look we need to we need to evolve we need to change our pricing models our our service models our data quality so on and so forth but hold your nerve because they're not going to all be around for very long and and actually when we come out of it and we will at some point we'll be proven to be the ones that carried on doing that job in the way that we always have better worse standard you know but the trust will still be there in us whereas they'll they'll prove their case wrong yeah uh thank you very much i think uh in in africa um um because of the investor service applications which are weighing down on uh the operators and also the lack of uh investment to recapitalize the uh the designated operators you find that the quality may be compromised and uh because of that there is a gap which is observed by startups they come in and try and fill in that gap but uh this is not a short race this is a marathon like my colleague has said they come in because they are seeing a mirage they believe ah there's an opportunity we can fill in this gap but uh they would not have understood the nuts and bolts of the industry the key success factors and because of that they would not last the distance so yes the perception that they create is that they can do it better but uh it's only a matter of time before they park before they abandon the mission and the the the traditional um players uh would last the distance and why um has the post survived over uh these centuries is because they keep adjusting the way they do their things right now when we talk of uh digital solutions they have embraced them and going forward that will not be a a competitive edge for for the startups and so you find that this trust which has been end over centuries over decades will continue to be um emphasized and cemented and uh thus my my belief is that uh yes they can come in competition is uh is good everyone needs to to be tested but uh the postal operators as we have them still have that trust which uh they've end over the years thank you yes um um the big thing today is to do business um in Asia but uh i must say especially we with startups you have to be very very very careful i think you have to first check the background of the people behind of the company because in our case we spent two years negotiating with the company negotiating rates and contracts and at the end of the day they bypass us and went directly um to the postal operator so um but because of that we have developed a e-wallet system whereby if costumer wants to do business with us they would deposit money in the wallet and they will retrieve or the the the deposit will be deluded as they as we ship on their behalf so it was a bad experience but at the same time it became a good experience because we have developed a new service and and it's all it's all about trust i mean you have to be careful who you're dying with so um that's my message thank you that was a question over there yeah hello great session so far thank you for it my name is Santosh Gopal i'm CEO of Shiptimid and also part of the considered committee in my view when it comes to post the trust comes in two elements one is in the data one is a trust on transaction so they are two different elements and today if you look at the private players that's one of the biggest challenges what they're facing because they're not able to validate the consumers with KYC they may not have access to the government IDs and i think the trust and security could be a differentiator which actually will make people think to work with post offices more i'd like to hear if there are what are the plans of using this challenge as an opportunity to create a differentiator for post offices yes i can give an example of that we have a service within the post office called printed mail hybrid mail whereby companies would digitally send their batch that invoices to us and we will print these invoices and fill up them and distribute them okay and we have deal with a local company that is a supplier of printers and this client specifically asked that whenever we receive the batch within as soon as the batch finish the printing of the ladders it will directly delete all the information so that's how you give trust to this case any any any businesses that want to do business is by using the power of technology in this case the printer capacity to delete all the information if you want to rate it as well i mean i i having spent a lot of time talking with salatage i understand where where his question comes from and certainly you know in terms of what the cooperative is doing we're looking at utilizing some of the work that's been done at the cc's level to enhance that security of data for our members and and for their their their populace across asia pacific you've got a really a really diverse breadth of government involvement with things like digital id and so on in Singapore we're completely online for all that sort of stuff you can't do a single thing without having your sing pass it it's on your phone and it's on yeah and it's with you the whole time and then there are some countries that haven't even got basic id for that for you know just get getting along so it's a it's a tough one but i think i think if we work from the premise that we we've always had a bit of a privileged space in the world as post so you know we're the only industry with a a un specialized agency set up for it and actually you know lovely though that is we're a commercial industry you know no other one has that so if you work from that premise and the fact that our job is to serve the public to give them access to communications and nowadays of course that's parcels rather than letters but to give them all of those things in a in a curated and easy to use way regardless of who you are where you are then then underpinning the ability to do that and i think chief mentioned items stuck in customs and so on earlier on and how you release those and what what that that security of data looks like is really really important the thing to remember and this is this is something that i've been cautioning within the cooperative but also within my conversations with the upu and ipc and various other agencies is that a one-size-fits-all approach fits no one yeah everything needs tailoring to that geography to that group of customers and even within a country within a geography there are subsets of customers that it needs tailoring for so i i i fully support the work that's being done with uh uh santosh and the cc and and i know that uh uh chief and papua are on board with that as well and we're following the example of papu in that but but my caution would be that as a as an industry our historic approach of one-size-fits-all is probably at its end and we need to be far more conscious that whilst the principles may be similar the application is vastly different you want to react as well thank you very much i think when it comes to a data protection these the approaches are different from country to country but what we are having at the moment is an attempt by our regulatory authorities to harmonize these laws so that a data protection of a customer or personal information is is the same as standards as items move from one country to another or through one country so yes at the moment regulatory authorities and governments assist with the issue of enhancing data protection more so because as we move to digital economies where there is plenty of information that is floating which needs to be secured then there is need for for a approach that to at the end of the day ensure that a customer's information is protected and for the post the majority of postal operators in Africa that are moving to market places or creating their e-commerce platforms they are a gradually gravitating towards the use of dot post and i don't think i need to lecture you the advantages that you get from dot post it's a cure it's always being developed to ensure that hackers do not access information for consumers and at the same time financial information for for the organization so at the end of the day it is the choice of the infrastructure that the operator would go for which would ensure that the security of the data in their custody is guaranteed and that way the trust that they have earned or that they want to earn is achieved and so i think it's a fluid process because we are getting into unfamiliar territory like i said before the post is moving to unfamiliar territory but once they master their came there there is no going back thank you we have one more question over here i think we're running out of time and i would even ask you to ask this question only the one of the three panelists if possible okay um my name is Milo Gaster because i am a managing economist and head of postal and delivery service at Copenhagen economics and as an economist my question is on the link between trust and universal service obligation it was mentioned i think in the panel some of you mentioned the universal service obligation and in europe we have a lot of discussion about the financial pressure that us o creates on postal operators i'm wondering in your regions um how do you see that link between trust and universal service obligation and how do you expect it to evolve in the future who shall answer um moya thank you very much yes uh in africa universal service obligation is the elephant in the room why the post is a developmental institution that the government is using to roll out various programs be it a social payment schemes be it making sure that women access funding through the post or the youth programs so the government would want to see the post offices operating even in areas that are not profitable that's on one hand on the other hand the operator is not keen because as you know you may want to the the the spirit may be willing but it's the the financial capacity uh that will determine whether you'll be able to do so or not and at the end of the day there is a compromise uh if it's a mail delivery then maybe uh frequencies are reduced from daily to once a week and sometimes once in two weeks and um then you'll find that uh to some extent a trust may not be a seriously injured but it will be rotated why because uh the people were expecting their items if they're in rural areas they know that uh their mail comes twice a week or three times a week but now when it comes once every week or every two weeks then they start getting worried to say is everything okay uh or we are not going to receive our items so yes there's a trade-off uh or should I say there's a link between trust and universal service application but at the same time from a government point of view from policy makers point of view they are comfortable that at least the service is still there at least the post office is still operational and maybe the time will come when the rains would fall and uh they'll be harvest and then the post office will continue to uh to operate in a in a more predictable manner very very last question but a short question to one panelist again please thanks but I don't know I'm sorry if I'm keeping people up from lunch it's Sima Somosundrum from the International Bureau of the Secretary I just want to pick up on the previous question that was raised by a colleague from Post NL because it left a rather discordant note with me in terms of the responses mainly because we've been sort of keeping track of the way in which startups and some of these I wouldn't say fly and fly but entities that are in the marketplace targeting last mile delivery particularly in the metropolitan areas because that's where the money is and so on and so forth and and I thought it was quite interesting that each of the three panelists seemed to think that the post would survive this I just at the back of my mind when I was thinking this through I couldn't help but draw the comparison with what's happening with financial transfers financial services in particular where the post traditionally in the case of domestic money transfers and to some extent the international money transfers has had a trust premium well-known network and so on and so forth but increasingly in many countries it's the finance the fintech companies the startups who are making significant inroads into that market space and posts are struggling so if you so what's the difference we we had the same features in terms of trust reach and network perhaps a a bit more regulated industry in the case of financial services and not last mile delivery in metropolitan areas but you know I think if we're not careful you're going to have a situation that could be quite similar thank you I think Sid you want to answer so maybe if I can pick this up so let me start with saying Severin you know me well enough to know I am not blindly positive about our industry in fact you know I started a speech in KL a couple of weeks ago with you know post is dead long with the post and what I mean is that what we have always been has got to change okay so when I when I say the you know hold your nerve you'll still be there I don't mean don't do anything you know because because let's face it when you look at the the competition that we're dealing with they're more agile they're more capable of being you know cost effective they're certainly more aggressive in their way they go about doing things and they're not encumbered with the regulations and at times glacial pace that we can work at and let's be really blunt about this but we do have an opportunity to change as a industry and we have a we have a huge amount of potential behind us that we do not have to go and find it is already there the analogy I would use and I use regularly is back in the days where Netflix came around they were sending out DVDs in the post and their their major competitor in the market was Blockbuster and the only difference between the two industries at that point the two companies at that point was that Blockbuster charged fees for being late and Netflix didn't and the CEO of Blockbuster went to his board and said I really think we should drop late fees because you know these guys are coming up quickly and the board said but that's nine percent of our profit we we're not dropping late fees we will lose nine percent of our profit two years two years later they lost their whole company to protect nine percent of their profit so look you know the same is true for post we fundamentally have to change and I would say almost every factor we are we're not great on data at the moment we're shocking on price overall the certainly on an international level the product range is confusing at best for customers it does not work for most people unless they have to use it at a consumer level at a company level it's worse than that there are so many people coming after my volume why do I need to go to the post one of the biggest complaints I get is I've tried to speak to your posts and they don't talk back we're not sales organisations on the whole so much has got to change so this is not me saying yeah post is perfect we're guaranteed to be around for another 200 years actually I think we've probably got five to ten years if we don't change of the dominance that we have well we haven't got the dominance anymore but of the position that we've had but we have a fundamentally sound base to do that from the question and and and Sivir you've been our chair in the past so you're aware of the challenges we have at APP the question I ask of my posts is is really simple we get the commercial people in the room they want to make the changes it's when it goes back and you get the policy people involved and the the old way of post working that things slow or stop how do we allow the two to work hand in hand the policy the regulation backing up the things we do quickly agilely to to change the market and at the moment I don't think that's there that's I think that's possibly one of our largest challenges our regulators need to allow us to be more agile the up is trying really hard to underpin some of that work as well as our IPC us various other entities I think the days of doing that in isolation are gone we need to come together as a group and actually make stuff happen so it isn't a blindness to the challenges I just think that and I genuinely believe that the the longevity we have had as an industry and the the history that therefore underpins that trust is the thing that we need to remember and hold on to whilst fundamentally transforming the business model at the same time and I'll just finish by saying we've got posts in our region that are actively talking about reducing their USO and my my caution on that is always do not reduce your USO change it it is not as you know the universal service obligation we all know it's not universal it's different in each country and in each territory it's run differently but the one thing it does guarantee that is that I can get to everyone and everywhere so to take Chief's point reduce the frequency in certain areas fine but do not reduce what you're offering because it's the one thing the probably the only thing actually that gives you the edge over every single competitor in your country and region Chief more wants to also react to you but then we really have to stop please go ahead thank you very much I wanted to make the observation that the post operates in a number of sub sectors so startups can come into an area where the post is not very good but there are areas where they will not find it easy and at the end of the day again it's an issue of strategic positioning of the post how do they treat startups how do they treat competition do you always have to go ahead on or you need to find a way of cooperating and working together I'll give an example of a financial services in Kenya where the MPSR came into play a mobile service money transfer and you find that this service caught fire in the rest of East Africa Southern Africa and a lot of these countries simply moved on to that and post offices that were forward-looking then got into partnerships with these institutions it's how they utilize their network presence to their own advantage and also to benefit this new entrance in a win-win kind of situation thank you he was very very short I just want to finish on a positive note I think we have to the ones that work in the postal industry especially the postal organization we have to be extremely proud of our network I had the pleasure two weeks three weeks ago to be in reach out in Saudi Arabia and one of the things that we were discussing is opening the market okay for the wider sector postal players now you have to ask yourself if these companies didn't have confidence in us and trust why are they knocking at the doors of UPU to be part of it this means that they perceive us as a trusted and secure postal organization and network so we are stronger than we think that we are and we should leverage on that mere fact combine our forces and capabilities with the private sector and then fortify the universal service obligation thank you very much for this really positive end-notes here because after sitting I was really scared a bit I mean I was hoping for a positive end-notes and you crushed it a bit but thank you very much you saved you saved no thank you very much to all the three panelists give them a big applause we are running a little bit late but of course that was the it's the fault of Siva who asked the last question I'm sure you all agree with that so thank you very much we'll back here at two o'clock in one and a half hours thank you